They go through some pretty extreme lengths to get you to waste money on buying books from them. The English classes my university published a new "reader textbook" ever quarter. It was just a crappy bounded letter paper book with section from various novels that they change up every quarter so you couldn't use an old one. The on campus copy center and nearby kinkos/staples/officemax/officedepot wouldn't photocopy it but a half hour drive out would reach stores that didn't care. A photocopy costed about 1/5 of the price the university was selling it at.
Years ago at the university, we had to buy straightup photocopies of articles and such out of books/magazines/whatever that the class would be taught off of at the campus bookstore at prices much higher than per-page copy.
Something about paying the source for licensing and distribution was the reason given.
On the other hand, my physics prof in relativity made us buy photocopies of his lecture notes, since he didn't like any of the available textbooks. (Don't sneer - I'm pretty sure he was better than any of them.) His notes cost, IIRC, $4 for 90-100 pages. This was 1983, but still, four cents a page is pretty good.
I had this one class on Picasso where the professor absolutely refused to use the only real book on the subject because the author didn’t properly give him credit from his thesis research so he handed out a folder of articles we passed around to make copies of. No licensing and distribution fees involved.
