I always wonder how University books cost so much. I know there is a lot of R&D that goes into them but still, 150 bucks for a book, really! In subjects like first and second year calculus why do those books need to be updated every two years. It's not like they are finding new methods to do integrals and derivitives. Whatever the case it really doesn't matter too much It was more that I just wanted to type something into my first weblog. ME
Elevators Being Installed . . . and More
5 years ago
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Where I studied (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) textbooks seemed to form an extra revenue stream for professors. They would write a textbook, and instead of selling us photocopies at cost price, some of them would go through a professional publisher, and the books would end up with a huge mark-up at the campus book store. The advantages of such a scheme were probably that you could try and sell the book at another university, or to pensioners who had started going to college again due to an abundance of money and time.
Of course, Dutch university students hardly pay any tuition, so their bargaining power is small. In other countries, students could insist on using cheap course material.
See http://www.wikibooks.org for an interesting experiment in free textbooks.
-- Branko Collin
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