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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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lol, I mostly ditched textbooks in high school not to support technology, but because I was tired of carrying around huge books in my backpack, the bulk of which I wouldn't even need on a daily basis. Lo and behold, even 14 years ago, I could find pdf versions of most of my textbooks, some of which were offered officially from the publisher for free via the school.
The problems are the enshittification of the internet, the attention economy and the superb lack of American educational system, not technology itself. Almost every university in the world is filled with the sounds of clacking keys from laptops, this isn't 1984.
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn't changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
I have a few college "textbooks" from the 1930's. They're small
I don't think it's necessarily the text books that are the issue but rather the physical act of writing your own notes.
I think it's that now people type all their notes into a laptop rather than write it down.
Did you not have a locker?
Not OP, but when I hear this argument, a lot of schools wouldn't let you go to your locker between all classes. That, or your classes were so far apart, you didn't have time to go even get to your locker between them. There were some days I could only get to my locker once.
Technology is part of it. For example, handwriting notes is proven to be better for information retention compared to typing.