[zzless]

This is indeed a nice idea, unfortunately the university (mine) gets kick backs from the book store. At the beginning of every semester every faculty gets an email asking us to 'encourage' students to buy their materials at the book store. Every semester I do what I always do and tell the students that the ($250!) book will not be used in class (although mine is just one in a sequence and the book is chosen by the whole department for the whole sequence) and give a half a dozen references to (excellent) free online books. Even then some students for whom the class is the terminal one in a sequence buy their books. Must be human nature at play. On a different note, as a flight instructor, when a future student asks me what to bring to the intro flight, I usually say 'lunch', since I provide everything else, including headsets. Yet half of them bring $500 worth of useless gadgets and expensive books (not, strangely enough, headsets) to 'be prepared'.