Fwd: Re: WAY OT! TEXT BOOKS
On Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:45:08 -0500, "Pam Niedermayer" <pam@pinehill.com> said: > Now that we all know the revisions are often trivial, why not buy the > previous edition on Amazon for a song? The textbook authors change the exercise problems at the end of each chapter and students can't do the homework problems with older books. In science and engineering, this may be a matter of changing numbers. In mathematics (where numbers aren't important), this may be a matter of shuffling the problems. But they suffice for the publisher's purpose. In science and engineering, introductory textbooks may have covered the same material for past decades, but I do see some difference in organization and presentation of the material to fit "standard" syllabus and improve readability. Use of color, graphics, etc. are sometimes useful, and also discourages xeroxing the whole book. I think textbooks for introductory courses of mathematics didn't change much over the decades... they still teach with Royden or Rudin for analysis, for example. Books get recycled, homework solutions get recycled, lecture notes get recycled, jokes in the lecture get recycled, EVERYTHING. (But those books are expensive, too.) When I was undergrad, I didn't buy books for about half of the courses (and skipped many of them). I bought film and went to shoot instead. But if I think back, books (and films) have been the cheapest part of education. (I also paid and still pay a LOT of library fines and other service fees, but that's a different story.) I think the "price" of not using the best available resource (for the particular learning experience) is higher in the long run. One phenomenon I see in some "institute" (don't ask) is that some professors use textbooks authored by the same institute although there are "better" books for the particular course, although, they are written by people at different universities. Well they won't admit this but institutional bias can influence things like this. I worked closely with one guy who is an author of a very famous graduate level textbook. When the edition came out, he run some numbers. Not surprisingly, he made less money than minimum wage if he counted all the hours he spent on the book. It is the publisher who is taking much money, followed by bookstores, and then the rest of people involved. Of course, if you go to India or China, you can buy the same book in paperback for 1/3 the US price. The author uses this international paperback edition when he brings the book to his lecture because it's easier to carry. |