The price at Norris Bookstore was just too much to bear. For a microeconomics textbook – a soft-cover one at that! – from which I was not going to read more than 10 pages, I wasn’t willing to pay $125. So Amazon.com it was.

When the yellow parcel showed up a week later, I wondered whether “Like New” really meant almost new, or whether it was going to have dog-ears or coffee stains. But apparently, in this case, “Like New” really meant, “India Edition.” In my quest to save 50 bucks, I ended up with an international version of my assigned textbook. Thanks, Amazon vendor with a 95 percent positive rating. Thanks, publishers who set textbook prices so high that I’m resorting to international editions in the first place.

It’s time to really think about how we can lower the cost of textbooks for good. In the age of the Internet, information is supposed to get cheaper, not more expensive. Look at everything from financial information – you can look up any public company on Yahoo!Finance – to daily news – recently, NYTimes.com became completely free for everyone.

Maybe schools like Northwestern should experiment with different ideas, such as publishing some of its own books. Why not? There’s no copyright on many books, because authors such as Milton and Shakespeare are long-dead. Another idea is to compile open-source textbooks online