Quote:
Originally Posted by Goshzilla
A lot of professors, in the mathematics department are usually interested in writing their own material than to rely on text books, I can see math books being cheaper in the long run, hopefully Dover publications will get in on this, they sell math text books for roughly 20 dollars a book.
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Math guy here also, and interestingly enough only one prof of ever used his own book and in that case he gave it to us and told us to NOT even bother buying the required book as it was only there because he was required to assign some book. He was one of my fav profs though. Still he handed out copies of his hand written book in chunks over the year. It would have been really nice to get it in a PDF.
I do see math texts as a great subject for an ereader. Once I reached the upper division courses and then grad courses, I never used more than 2-3 books at once and even then it was usually a primary text then some support pages from the other texts.
I WISH some of my profs had used Dover...I still remember the chill I had from opening my Abstract Algebra text in the bookstore and reading the price. And the thing was a whole, 147 pages or something in that ballpark. But you know what they say in math "....beware the thin book..." because that means they left out everything you actually are there to learn...hahaha...
I got my last degree over 12 yrs ago and even then prices were off the charts. I shudder to consider where they are today.
Like many here I started my college studies in the 70s and continued on and off with other degrees until the mid-90s. During that span I saw a steady decline in the ability to resell my books. I kept most of them because the 10-25% we would get back was hardly worth the effort compared to the reference the ones I kept provided. I chose to give the books I did not need to keep to fellow students who were working their way through school like I was. The move to ebooks will pretty much kill that as well as used books. Still they will always have to sell dead tree copies as there will always be those who cannot read on the device due to limitations of the display.
The single tool I would have walked through broken glass for when beginning college was a word processor. I was an awful typist and spent more time typing than I did researching and writing a paper. When getting my math degree, MathCad & Mathematica for Windows came out and I was in HEAVEN, I could transcribe my notes right after the lectures that day!! Prior to that I used a WP called AmiPro (now WordPro from IBM) that had a great equation editor. I think an ebook reading device would be the same today in terms of freeing up time and effort to focus on studying.