Saving students money when assigning textbooks
For the two intro sociology classes that I'm teaching this semester, I've again assigned a reader edited by James Henslin Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings. 14th Edition. The list price is $23 but online sources, such as Amazon, sell it these days for under $17. Most of the readings are abridged research articles and selections from books. It's good for students to read actual research findings rather than very short summaries of them in regular textbooks. Another advantage is that it's an easy-to-carry paperback.

One chapter that I especially like using for teaching is Devah Pager's audit study in Milwaukee on young men--two white and two black--applying for jobs. The men submitted the same information on education and job experience but rotated by week on how they answered criminal record questions. The complete article in the American Journal of Sociology, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," is at her Princeton website. For a quick summary of the findings, see the graph on page 958. [edited on September 18, 2014: Devah now teaches at Harvard, so the new site for the article is  http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pager/files/pager_ajs.pdf ]

This semester I'm experimenting with using as a supplement a free online textbook that was posted on Flat World Knowledge near the end of last semester: Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, Brief Edition by Steve Barkan. Typical hardback intro soc textbooks cost over $80 or even over $100, so I hope that sites like this one do well.