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From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.physics,comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to beat the high cost of text books!
Message-ID: <17553@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 30 Nov 88 03:11:36 GMT
References: <2219@cbnews.ATT.COM> <684@stech.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
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In article <684@stech.UUCP> sysop@stech.UUCP (Jan Harrington) writes:

>As the author of several textbooks, this gives me nightmares. There is more

As the recent author of a textbook, I'd like to give an alternate point
of view.

>than you might think involved with the creation of a textbook. First of all,
>textbooks are "reviewed." That means that the manuscript is sent to various
>people who might use it in their courses for critiquing. The book is read
>for technical accuracy as well as style, readability, etc. Part of the
>cost of producing a quality text lies in paying decent honorariums to good
>reviewers (the process takes a significant amount of the reviewer's time
>and effort).

I found the reviews to be not only unhelpful, but downright harmful.  There
was not much consistency among them, at least in my case.  Reviewers liked
some features and didn't like other features of my book, but the several
"like-lists" were almost totally disjoint from one reviewer to another,
and the "dislike-lists" had the same problem.  Several reviewers loved
my exercises, "the best part of the book," while others characterized the
exercises as "too difficult" and in the case of one reviewer, "contrived"!
[I did however delight in the fact that for one particular facet of my
book, the VAST MAJORITY of the reviewers said, "I like this, but nobody 
else will," quite a remarkable irony!  :-)  ]

Another problem was the "dumbing-down" that we are starting to hear about
grade-school and high-school books; some reviewers want this trend in the
universities!

>The publishers have little to say with what text is adopted in a given course,
>though their representatives are always trying to get books adopted. Textbooks

A real problem is that almost all publisher's sales reps have no technical
background at all.  How can they sell a book?

>are expensive because a great deal of care and effort goes into their
>writing and because the market for a text is relatively small. Desktop

Yes, these SOUND LIKE reasonable explanations for the high price of
textbooks.  But oligopolistic market structure is a much better explanation.
The plain truth is that publishers "have students over a barrel"  --  the
students MUST buy the books, and so the publishers can to a great extent
charge what they want.

Here is a little experiment you can do to see this:  There are a great
many softcover books on "Unix for programmers" on the market.  Most are
intended to be sold to nonstudents, but the one by Paul Wang is aimed
as a textbook for university courses.  It is of very similar content to
other books, but is considerably more expensive (check this yourself).

>a text is serious business. If you do it well, then you get royalties because
>the book sells. 

No author will refuse royalties, but even with the high book prices, it's
just not **financially** worth the time and effort in the majority of
cases.  I would claim that most authors of textbooks write the books 
because they feel that they have something special to say, not because 
of the money.

>I sympathize with your having to pay for textbooks, but consider that a
>cost of going to college. The text was hardly used? How should a text be
>used? An instructor shouldn't necessarily teach directly from a text. Even
>if you're not assigned specific readings, find the chapters in the text that
>supplement what's going on in the classroom. In that way, you can get every
>bit of value out of the text and add to what happens in lecture. 

Yes, excellent points.  I would add the following:  Consumers of texts in
engineering/CS will end up with salaries which are in the upper strata
among American incomes  --  and before even reaching the age of 30!
[Check the statistics if you are skeptical about this; it's true.]  In
that light, a few lousy dollars for a textbook is really a small
investment that pays big dividends.

   Norm Matloff