<i>the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars</i><p>The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very close to that.<p><a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-rant.html" rel="nofollow">http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-ran...</a>