Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
The facts are that just as any other business college texts sell for whatever the market will bear. If a publisher can get $186.19 for Fundamentals of Aerodynamics he most certainly will. And if a student can find the same text on the used market, then he will do that.
In my college days, which admittedly were a very long time ago, professors would frequently supplement their income by authoring and publishing a small run textbook and assigning it to their class. Their clientele usually was limited to their own students, so they might sell a maximum of a few hundred books over a several year run; but when the used book market caught up, that well would run dry. Selling and trading used textbooks was a thriving business in college towns across the country.
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Yes, I recall junior in college the professor teaching the class in reaction engineering required the book he published the previous summer. The first day of class he passed out copies, at least 25-30 typed pages, of errata. We were expected to keep that folded and inserted into the book to read the relevant corrections for every book page. I know that I paid at least $75 (1975 dollars) for that piece of crap. A new edition was issued the following summer with the corrections in that errata and many more we guinea pigs found. No chance to sell my copy to anyone then.