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ghoti
owner for sale by house
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Charlotte, NC
 
2006-03-27, 20:47

Our bookstore buys used textbooks and sells them again. I agree that textbooks are too expensive, but only having them in electronic form is not a solution. Paper is much more useful, and what if you realize that you really liked that one book/want to stay in that field and will use that book in the future? I threw away many of my textbooks, but I still have half a dozen or so that I really like and also use every now and again.

BTW, the only people getting rich from those books are the publishers. I've written two book chapters, and haven't seen a single cent. That's probably different for monographs, but even then I doubt that the authors make a lot of money. Also, in some areas there just aren't any useful textbooks at all. I'm teaching a course right now, and I give my students photocopies from several books. I could have required to buy two or three textbooks, though .... So perhaps I'll write a book someday, and that will certainly be relevant for my course (if I still teach it by then). And even if there are books on your subject, they are not going to necessarily reflect what you want to teach your students, or how you think the material should be presented.
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