- #36
SunnyBoyNY
- 63
- 0
jtbell said:If a student in one of my classes insisted on using an older edition of the textbook, I'd say, "OK, but you're responsible for dealing with any differences in content: chapters shuffled around, exercises renumbered or changed completely, etc."
Of course most students would buy the new edition. And what I find most interesting is that there is really no need to use a 2011 textbook to teach basic circuits, Laplace, linear algebra, etc.
While the text itself is barely updated in newer editions, the exercises are usually completely scrambled or a variable is changed so that the older edition is rendered unusable. One can imagine that if exercises stayed the same, just a portion of students would buy the new book while the rest would probably obtain their copy from a second-hand source and thus not generate revenue for the publisher.
Praise the professors who sympathize with students and use inexpensive, yet top-notch textbooks.