There’s been a lot of talk about moving to digital textbooks. In some classes - like my accounting class - the transition has already begun. The original textbook Accounting Principles is divided into the separate sections - since the accounting sequence is three classes - and each piece is sold separately for $50. Instead of a hefty ten pound
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Ok so it's is like 5 books.. but they are really helpful ones.
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But look at a field like astronomy. My dad got his BA and Master's in astronomy in the late 60s-early 70s, but so much has happened in that field since then that when I took a basic intro class to the solar system a year or two ago, he couldn't help me on a lot of my homework because he didn't know the answers.
So his textbooks? Pretty freakin' useless.
But yeah, the thing irks me the most is definitely the limited ownership of the text.
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I would be mighty pissed if I had to buy those books :P we had a packet of that sort while I was doing my Bachelor of Education with selections that the teachers chose for each week of the course, and that was quite annoying because we couldn't sell that back.
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I'm sure the paper quality must vary with publisher, just like with regular textbooks. This particular company *seems* like they're trying to push into an all-digital arena, and the print textbooks really seem like an afterthought, which probably accounts for some of the crumminess. Does the psych book you use have on-line resources that you also use?
Most of my textbooks now seem to come with cards/flyers/etc. for some sort of extra online media, but the accounting class is the first one I've had that actually used the materials.
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Then again, I also have an expensive astronomy textbook that will never go anywhere, so I guess it's a mixed bag. I think I'd prefer to have the book and be able to sell it back.
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In an English class, I had an older edition and it turned out about 1/4 of the articles had been switched out for new ones. So if a teacher assigned three readings, there was a chance that one of them wouldn't be in the book. "Aw man, " I thought "I'm going to have to get the new edition."
OR NOT. It turns out that every single one of the 'new' articles were also available on the internet, for free!
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