So at the beginning of the semester I purchased my Accounting textbook. If I remember correctly I paid around $100 for a new text book and work book (they were sealed in plastic and I paid the new price for them)
It’s a pretty nice looking book up till the 14th chapter and beyond…which looks like someone fucking xeroxed the pages in. I’m not exaggerating. The whole book is in full color and then it looks like some retarded intern photocopied the last chapter, the appendices, and the index into the book.
Seriously WTF? It’s not even the same paper as the rest of the book either. It’s the same kind of paper as you would find in a home printer. The contrast is off and and the illustrations are hard to read.
Not quite the same thing as in the OP, but I’m currently reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen. It’s about how history textbooks have bowdlerized, sanitized, and sterilized genuine history into bite-sized chunks for kids to digest and immediately purge from their brains.
Textbook publishers are the next ones to be hit by economic reality. Already enough students are filesharing textbook content that they are feeling a hit - with some textbook companies considering electronic publishing next, the era of the $100 textbook might be ending.
Is it a customized edition for your school? Large Soulless State University (LSSU), where I attend, occasionally “customizes” editions by cutting a book in half and adding something to the end.
I still don’t understand why US students have to buy their own expensive textbooks instead of the University library having a text book section (Lehrbuchsammlung) where they can be borrowed. Would that be too socalist?
Publishers are turning towards electronic publishing models for the sole reason of re-exerting control over their product. Producing a paper text ensures the owner has a tangible good. It also ensures the owner actually owns something and can manipulate it however they wish. (In the case of text books it typically means the owner can underline, highlight, and add in their own comments. It also means they can photocopy it or digitally share it.)
Publishers want to only produce an electronic product so that they maintain control over how owners can manipulate their product. If you can only access your purchased textbook via the internet and the publishers password protected servers, well they have just ensured that illegal distribution of their product is much more difficult.
I also fail to see why electronic publishing of textbooks would reduce the cost to the student. While academic serials have wholeheartedly embraced electronic publishing, the cost of the serials has not decreased (and, in fact, in many cases the cost has increased. For example, if you want both print and digital copies, or if you want perpetual access, or the right to download onto your school’s own servers the electronic serial).
I still remember buying Wheelock’s Latin, fifth edition. No changes from the previous edition, except that they had moved the footnotes to endnotes (annoying) and introduced typos into the paradigms.
Introduced typos into the paradigms of a language textbook.
When I choose books for my classes, I always try to make sure my textbooks are reasonably priced (ideally less than $100 / semester / class) and that we use most or all of the books we buy. On the other hand, students complain that they can’t sell them back at the end of the semester! (Sorry, kid, I’m not in control of my teaching schedule. On the other hand, you’ve just bought a really good book for $30. Of course, you never read it, so how would you know? Try ebay.)
My problem is that chapter that looks like it was photocopied is hard on my eyes to read. If they had done the whole book in black and white, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Hell if they had just done that last few chapters in black and white but had done it so it isn’t a pain to read I would have been fine with that too.
The good news is that I don’t have to buy a new accounting book next semester. Accounting I does one half of the book and Accounting II does the other half. We take a lot of time on each chapter and do a lot of exercises in class together.
I’d be surprised if the library didn’t have a few copies, but if everyone in the class needs the same book at the same time there’s no real benefit to the university buying a hundred copies (and then buying a hundred more when the next edition comes out) instead of having your hundred students buy their own copy and giving them the option of selling it to the next year’s class via the second-hand bookstore. At least this way a student gets to keep their copy if it’s a useful reference, without paying for the book twice (once for the library copy and once for their own).
No, the text book section typically does have 50 or more copies of a text book. Each semester beginn, the library checks the editions, orders the newest one and sells the oldest one to the new students cheaply (think about 5 Euros). E.g they buy the 21st edition and sell the 17th edition; the changes are usually so minimal that the more experienced students buy the old ones to have their own copy.
Also, what do you mean, paying twice - a library lends books, you don’t pay for them. What are your US university libraries doing??
My problem with the textbooks is that they constantly change them in order to prevent used-book sales. It’s a huge racket. You have some big math or science book that covers at least three or four semester of material, you use it for one semester and then you find out they’ve come out with a new edition. Everything’s the same except the homework problems and so forth.
Yeah, from tuition fees. I’ve never heard of a school where you have to pay extra for the library - kind of defeats the purpose of a university, don’t you think?
When I was taking intro physics, my class got to use the first printing of a new edition of the Halliday & Resnick textbooks. Part of our homework assignments involved working through the sample problems to check for errors in the answers that were provided, and I had a couple of interesting visiting-hours meetings with one professor where we eventually realized that there were also typos in the main text.
Well, I don’t think the librarians would like my highlights and margin notes in their textbooks, and there is always the chance that other students wouldn’t find my markup useful either.