They are too wordy, they are too expensive, and they contain lots of things not in the syllabus, like “The name of the person who discovered atoms”; thus, it’s annoying to filter out all the unnecessary information that will not be tested on the examination. Surprisingly, even teachers, including my biology teacher last year, slowly figured this out, and thus rarely, if ever, use the textbook in its original form.
I heard universities love them though.
And you may need them for homework.
It is sadly the case that they are bought with precious money.
Recently, I found a system to incrementally erase all unnecessary information from them called incremental reading on digital media. Now, I don't like physical textbooks, but... guess what! It's still too long! So if alternatives exist, I would use them.
And reading… I don’t know why they are continuing to force humans to read BOOKS. Not Wikipedia, not Blog posts, just books. Even worse, not all books are allowed; it’s just physical books that are accepted. They are already highly outdated by this point. Due to costs, and the inability to perform SuperMemo incremental reading on them. Rather, it's just so that they can have control of restricting our creativity by not allowing what they call "distractions" (of web surfing). Yay!