Yea but the quote talked about pooling your money with a friend. I assumed he meant someone also taking the class. You buy a book with your friends who also need that book then scan it. Each of you has a copy of the scan.
You don’t need a copy shop. Scanners are cheaper then textbooks these days.
This is why they invented white out. Know anyone took the class already willing to sell and only wrote their name in a white space? Heck this suggestion is even legal.
He has us write it on the edge opposite the spine. He won’t even let you be in class without your book.
The teacher is in my opinion a jerk who pretends to be nice for other reasons than his textbook policies.
Holy crap. Is the class about the politics of Benito Mussolini?
Nope, Human Relations.
As in how screwing someone can be considered ‘relations’ I’m sure.
To be fair it’s also a work book and a textbook. There are a lot of team exercises that we do in it as well.
Ahh I see. Well maybe it isn’t so bad then.
I’m still getting used to college ideas about books. Last semester in one of my classes we had book work in the actual book. Worksheets and stuff. Instead of answering on a separate sheet of paper we were told to write in the book AND RIP THE PAGES OUT to hand in.
I cringe every time I think about it. you don’t deface books, it’s more evil than blowing up a bus full of nuns, kittens, and orphans.
Especially since kittens are so delicious, it’s a crime to blow them up. Nuns and orphans are more of an acquired taste.
On the first day of my Data Structures class sophomore year of college, the professor walked in and passed out a copy of the Errata to every student… The thing was, I shit you not, at least a quarter-inch thick. Then when we started in on the material, we found even more problems (such as a book example about calculating leap years… that did not properly calculate leap years). :smack:
Because It’s The Way It’s Done, i.e. the Powers That Be have no particular interest in changing things (and make money off of it).
Besides, this way the library does NOT have to acquire enough books for who may potentially sign up for the course. Some classes (e.g. Introductory Chemistry) have guaranteed enrollments of hundreds, some end up being withdrawn from the term’s calendar because preregistration did not meet minimum class size (e.g. The Political Aesthetics of Yoko Ono). And even within a class, enrollment is a variable number. So instead, they leave it up to the market keep one or two or a handful of copies “in Reserve” for special needs.
As mentioned before, highlighting/underlining and making margin notes have been accepted study-aids among American students, in lieu of copying the important information onto your own notebook. Heck, some students even use a whole systematized color code of highlighters for the different parts of the subject.
In a curious way it’s one of the ways the US marks the difference between college/university and K-12 school, at least in the public (government-run) system. K-12 public school provides textbooks for you. College/university, even the public ones, you have to buy your own
I once had a thin(120 pages or so) book for a particular class that was still around $90, and this was back in the late 90’s. Happened sometimes that they’d put a ridiculous price tag on a small book, but that’s not what pissed me off. No, it was Chapter 7. Where all the formulas were just… blank space. The text talking about the formulae were there, but not the actual formula. And of course, this being Chapter 7, it was FAR past the point where I could return the book.
I can only imagine how much more expensive my tuition/fees would be if the library had to buy 50+ copies of textbooks for every single class offered. And then what good are the books when a new version comes out that the professor wants to use? Hell, as an engineering major each one of my books often cost at least $120-180. :eek:
I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want to be paying a large chunk for books OTHER people need. I’d rather buy my own and be able to keep them or sell them back at the end, at my discretion (all the while highlighting or writing in the book at my discretion too). I typically don’t like to write in my textbooks as a general rule, but if I find a sentence or equation that needs highlighting or clarification, I’m going to write in the book (if it’s mine).
The textbook situation in American schools is by no means perfect, but the solution lies in lowering textbook prices and making publishers not issue a “new” edition every other year.
One thing our university is talking about is standardizing the textbooks. At least in large courses, no matter which professor teaches the class, he or she would have to use the same books as all the other sections. Administrators and textbook profiteers love this idea. Students like it (predictability, assurance that books can be sold back, greater possibility of cheating [a slim minority, I assume]. Professors hate it.
The quality of US textbooks in general seems shoddier than Irish or British published ones.
That in turn may be a self-reinforcing result of the previously mentioned practice of making periodic slightly-changed “new” editions in order to cut down on the secondhand market and increase the profit for the publisher, the cut of the U bookstore and the royalties for Dr. Professor Of This Very Course, author. And yes, once in a while you will have some field where the rate of progress may be such that the books will become obsolete within 4 years so why bother making a product that lasts.
That still is different from and can’t ever excuse such things as 50 pages worth of errata and a whole chapter where the formulae failed to print together with the text, of course. That’s just unacceptable and a stack of mimeographed pages with the correct content would be more useful.