[Leica] iPad and textbooks

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

On Feb 5, 2010, at 9:41, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
> Why so many college textbooks at $50 a pop? Many colleges, including mine,
> look for a magic number in evaluating professors for promotion. Our college
> counts the number of papers published in academic journals as a major 
> index.
> Three peer reviewed papers equal one textbook. Judging from personal
> experience it is quicker, and often easier, to write a textbook for
> undergraduate courses than to do the research for a substantive paper.
> Naturally the publishers want to sell co-pies of the books that they print
> so the professors are encouraged to require all students to buy the latest
> edition of the book. The iPad, using books accessed from the internet, will
> kill that market. The colleges will be forced to use a different metric 
> than
> "Publish or perish."

$50 a pop? Not even when I went to school a longtime ago. :)

Engineering and computer science textbooks are more likely to be $100-$200 
today. I've bought a technical book for work once that was about $1/page.

Publish or perish still applies though. How else will they judge if someone 
is worthy of a professorship?

If I am in school today, I would happily buy anything that would allow me 
not to carry around 5Kg of paper every day to/from class. I have computer so 
an extension like an iPad would not be a problem.

Regards,
Spencer