What if that guy is an idiot?
You know, the one that had the text book before you and marked it all up?
In my college days, I really would try to find used books to save money. I looked through lots of books in hopes of finding one that had been previously owned by a non-active learner--the kind of student who typically doesn't mark up his text books. But if none of those were to be found in the stacks, I'd buy new.
I knew the best way to get the most of out a text book was to mark it up myself. The act of interacting with my highlighter would be part of the process that helped me learn. If someone else had already done that work, I might be the one to miss out. Worse, what if the guy was an idiot? What if he highlighted things that just weren't important and missed the real concepts? Then when I crammed the night before an exam, I'd have no way to weed out the happenstance from the highlights.
Oh sure, I might get lucky and get the book marked up by Boy Braniac, but what were the chances of that? So when Joe Wikert suggested that students might pay extra for the notes by the previous owner, I was dumbfounded.
What if we could...enable students to resell their textbooks for more than what they paid? How? By including all their notes in them as e-textbooks.
Really? Pay extra for one random student's notes? Not me.
But create a system of highlights and notes by a lot of former students (anonymous attribution is fine), along with their grades and a list of classes they'd taken to date, and I'm in. Grades would serve as a proxy--a way to keep me from following fools into dark places. But the A+ guys wouldn't necessarily be the ones I'd go after. If the subject was a breeze for them, their markup might be sparse or cryptic, and therefore not that helpful. Similarly, it might be useful to know which students hadn't yet taken an economics class by the time they marked up a finance text book--especially if I hadn't taken Econ yet either. Of course, throw in the social aspect and let me "follow" someone so I can see what else he has marked up. And let me see reviews of the annotations made by a given person (like a sub-text book) so I can decide for myself whether to turn-on or subscribe to that markup. Then let me overlay the markup on top of the markup I did myself so I could learn by studying the differences.
Let's quit thinking of ebooks as digital copies of physical books and leverage the platform of technology. Then it won't matter if the guy who owned the book before I did was That Guy.