Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/02/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]My kids undergraduate texts books are $500 - $600 per semester.? That's about $125 to $150 per book on an average. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Spencer Cheng" <spencer at aotera.org> To: "Leica Users Group" <lug at leica-users.org> Sent: Friday, February 5, 2010 10:20:21 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [Leica] iPad and textbooks 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 _______________________________________________ Leica Users Group. See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information