Why on earth does a two inch stack of paper cost money-strapped college students hundreds of dollars? While we can debate about the overhead of running a publishing system that requires a ton of middlemen, editors, etc., the cost of textbooks is certainly not because of the dead trees required to print the books. For this reason, hoping that eTextbooks will solve the problem is wishful thinking: they will not make the ‘system’ of a large textbook publisher vanish.