I kid you not when I say that a lot of money has stopped going to creators and authors, whether in the book or music industry, because it's going to those making the hardware, in other words, technological devices.
Some colleges have opted to give every student an iPad. Schools have also begun incorporating digital interactive whiteboards into classrooms. I believe Quebec's education ministry spent more than $200 million on interactive whiteboards and $40 million on educational content. Educational content is akin to literary materials, if you will. What is happening in today's society is that money is being invested in technology, whereas, in the past, that money would have gone elsewhere. When I was in college and university, I read print books. We didn't have iPads or computers. Seeing where I landed in life, you might say it didn't make much of a difference, anyways—that time, I was kidding. At the end of the day, huge sums are being put towards technological devices and equipment, what I like to call hardware.
I can appreciate why universities, colleges, and schools lament how expensive it is. I think that if the government were to really look at where education dollars are going, it would probably find that less and less was going to authors while more and more was going to the Apples of the world. That's a reality.
I'm not sure whether you have any college-age children, but I think they all get an iPad now, don't they?