textbook frustrations
Uncertain Principles: The High Cost of Assigned Reading. He talks about how professors don't have much of an option to use cheaper books; anyway, I think that the publishers are at fault. I left a comment there.
As frustrating as the high prices and constant new editions (updated sections on the latest versions of MatLab and Mathematica, anyone?) is the dropping of useful parts... in my past two textbooks for EE courses, the answers to the problem sets weren't in the back. They were online, requiring a username and password. So second hand books have no solutions, unless someone was thoughtful enough to write the username and password inside the cover. And if I go back to the book in ten years, what's the likelihood that the solutions will still be accessible?
the insidehighered article that spurred this has a list of a few lower priced and free textbook publishers... one of them, Dover Publications is apparently publishing math and science texts from the 60s.
