Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But academic standards have not remained the same; as the range of subjects taught in schools has widened, the depth of knowledge taught in maths and sciences has fallen. 30 years ago, an undergraduate physics textbook could assume that the reader knew what a "line integral" or a "2nd order ordinary differential equation" was; today, people are going to university to study physics, having barely been introduced to elementary calculus, and a textbook used when I was a student in the late 1970s would be incomprehensible. Textbooks are constantly having to be revised, therefore, to match the syllabuses set by the school examination boards. Even the textbooks I wrote myself in the mid '90s can no longer be used, for that reason - they are now considered to be too "hard".
|
I heard that! A few years ago I was a substitute instructor for first year Calculus at a local community college. When I was given the course syllabus I was shocked to see that the first semester was spent on concepts from algebra and trigonometry that had been taught in the third and fourth years of high school in my day. Limits were not even mentioned until the second semester of the college “Calculus” class.
This whole discussion has given me the idea of a successful model for e-book authors and publishers for negating the income loss from piracy, at least for text books and required reading for classes. That is if e-books ever make a big penetration into this market; likely a slow process for sure. Charge each student a per book fee to take the class with the fee passed on to the publisher for each required e-book. The student can download it for free from the legitimate source, or from some 'darknet' site if that floats his boat.
Doesn't solve the general e-book piracy problem, but it does for a small niche market at least.