I am a librarian at a university; we keep books on reserve only when instructors give us a copy. Usually they’re the edition earlier than the one being used in-class, but sometimes they’re the latest edition. Some professors won’t put a copy on reserve, and we don’t really have space to have every textbook on reserve, regardless of whether we purchase them or not. That is part of why we don’t buy them, and it’s similar for other universities IME.
If they’re well-known, this shouldn’t be a problem. If they’re not, then you may be stuck with the latest edition. If it’s something like the Norton Anthology of [this, that, and the other thing], you may need that specific edition because they do change it up from time to time.
I did just fine with the electronic copies I got from librarypirate.me
Saved me about $300. I explained the situation to my professors, and they all understood and allowed me to view the textbooks on my laptop or my phone. I still had to buy some textbooks that I couldn’t find on the site, but I went for the older edition and did just fine. When I had to, I’d borrow someone else’s book if the questions were different than my edition and scan it.
Being that this place owes much of its existence to a literary background, it isn’t surprising that publisher apologists show up all over the place.
What good is a publisher if they were unable to design a quality textbook for College Algebra until 2012? They keep missing typos? Geeze, what an incompetent bunch!
Surely there are cases where up-to-the-minute material is relevant. I concede that an updated version would be helpful; but the textbook model in general is manipulative and predatory.
I always resold my textbooks at the end of the semester on Amazon.com, and generaly I came out even. I had the correct textbooks for my classes, without having to go to the library, or make photocopies, and I payed almost nothing for it. I ended up with the wrong version for one class, but like others said, the same material is there, just on a different page number.
On the one hand, you have introductory textbooks which come out with a new edition every year that features slight or even purely cosmetic changes. For classes that use these books, you’re generally pretty safe using an older edition and just making sure that you have the equivalent readings/problem numbers.
On the other hand, you have upper level textbooks that come out with a new edition every decade or so that has substantive changes, often incorporating material that didn’t exist as of the last addition and dropping the parts that aren’t relevant any more. For the classes that go with these books, you are really taking your chances with an old edition, and it’s often worth spending the money to get the right edition so you don’t have to deal with not having it.
Well, yes and no. (Shakespeare prof here.) What you lose with an older edition or an e-text is all the scholarly work that the editors have put in – footnotes, introductions, information about historical context, bibliographies. In some cases, older texts are even missing line numbers, which are absolutely essential for citing quotations. Also, if there’s more than one early printed text – which is the case with at least half of Shakespeare’s plays – there are invariably differences that the editors have to reconcile. For example, here are three different versions of one of the most famous passages from Romeo and Juliet:
I’m pretty flexible about the texts I’m willing to let students use; if someone wants to get the cheap little Folger or Penguin editions rather than the big Norton Shakespeare I’ve ordered for the class, that’s fine. Actually, that can lead to some cool teaching moments when we talk about the choices editors have to make, and why the wording may be slightly different in one edition than in another. But I do tell students they absolutely MUST have a recent edition with detailed notes. Inevitably, one or two students ignore this (usually the theater majors for some reason) and try to get by with Project Gutenberg, or some reprint of a 1900 edition that they found on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble. It doesn’t go well. (My favorite story involves a student who tried to use a copy of Henry V that had no footnotes, and therefore completely missed the fact that some of the army captains were supposed to be Scottish, Welsh, or Irish. He thought they had speech impediments. And then he was completely flummoxed when he got to the scene that is entirely in French :))
When I went back to school for some classes, I always went one edition back. Surprisingly, beginner’s level anthropology and psychology hadn’t changed much between 2002 and 2007. I was as shocked as I’m sure you all are. But paying $7 for a used textbook through Amazon sure beat paying $130.
One class I skipped the text entirely until one of the last (take home) exams which directly asked about a few questions from a particular chapter. I found a site that sold PDFs of individual textbook chapters and bought the relevant one for something like three bucks. I believe they were legit, they claimed to be legit but, honestly, for $3 vs $130 for a book I only needed once, I don’t care all that much.
What would be wrong with freezing the 2012 version of your Shakespeare text and holding off printing a new edition for a decade? Surely the past 400+ years have been ample time to digest the work. If not, I imagine supplementing contemporary material into your curriculum is something you already do, and thus wouldn’t be a burden on your time.
I’ll admit, I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. Your example, however, is precisely what infuriates me about college textbooks. Publishers annually introduce century old material and expect hundreds of dollars for their effort. It makes education prohibitively expensive for absolutely no reason. Teachers* hate it, students hate it, and universities hate it. The only benefit is to the publisher.
Edit: * I guess you don’t, so imagine my hyperbole to be modified accordingly.
That’s pretty much what they do; the first edition of the Norton Shakespeare, which is the text I use, dates from 1997, the second edition from 2008. The other widely-used text in my field is the Riverside, which is updated even less frequently: first edition 1974, second edition 1996.
But there actually is new scholarship coming out all the time, even about 400-year-old plays, and some of it makes a difference. For example, there are two early texts of King Lear which are noticeably different from each other; whole passages appear in the 1608 Quarto but not in the 1623 Folio and vice versa. It used to be the standard practice for editors to silently combine these two texts, throwing every passage that appeared in at least one of them into a longer conflated version. Currently, many scholars think that this is a misleading practice – they are two slightly different plays and looking at the changes potentially tells us interesting things about revision. So in the new edition, the Norton editors print them side-by-side so that students can compare the two texts easily. This wasn’t standard practice even a decade ago.
(I’m not blindly defending the textbook companies, by the way; a lot of them do update editions more often than they need to, and it is frustrating for instructors as well as students – especially when the short story or play you’re used to teaching suddenly disappears from the new edition. But I wanted to make the point that there are legitimate reasons for updating texts, even when they deal with material that might not seem to change that much.)