Textbook rant

Seth opines 'assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice'.

Should I risk agreement? (I am a Seth fan, so I plead lack of 'objective judgement'!)

Note the responses he got, to his view.

[Update: got more mail about this post than any other post ever. People pointed to Flatworld and to Quirk, and so far, more than 94% of the letters aggressively agree with me. Most of the people are either students, parents of students, former students or other disgruntled customers that are tired of being ripped off by a senseless, broken system. I also heard from a handful of people who said that I was jealous, that the union won't permit the system to change, that textbooks are really good, that professors are underpaid, that professors are too busy or (possibly and) that I'm delusional. I'll note that not one of these letters came from a textbook user.]