My son has a mobile laser tag business in Ottawa and he gets continual calls to participate in these programs. Every time he has to tell that their model does not work for him. Cutting his price in half and then giving half away means he would be operating at a loss. Given that most people only ever book one party in their child's life, it means he would be loosing move and destroying his market. My son has chosen to focus on traditional marketing and high customer service.

open textbooks
Having a daughter in university I listened to the piece on open textbooks rather closely. I think the approach is a good one and valid.
An alternative would be to licence the textbook to each course. Every student would have to pay a fixed fee for the content as a part o registration, and then they could choose how to access it. Print on demand or ebook versions would be free while an actual hard copy would sell for the price of short run production. People who would then look to sell the physical copy would be doing just that. Any potential buyer of a used physical product would have already paid a content fee when they registered.

Andrew