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Fuck his corrupt ass
Bro what 😭😭😭😭me when I write an educational textbook
I’ve had classes with a couple textbook authors and every time they strongly imply that we should pirate their books. People write textbooks out of frustration with their alternatives, not out of profit motive. The publisher is the one making most of that cash.
we had that book in uni, 5th edition or so i think. it was so expensive that it was cheaper for me to buy an e-book reader and pirate the book. and this was when the original kindle was like 300 bucks.
It’s criminal how much unis charge and they don’t even throw in the textbooks, it was bad when I was studying and it’s only got worse
The computer science department at my uni passed a department-wide rule that the total cost for all required materials must be zero dollars. Very thankful for that, saved me a decent chunk of money.
Talk to your state government about actually funding education for its people again.
That addresses the funding side, but there’s a corruption/conflict of interest side to it, too. Like when the author is also a prof or when the publishers offer kick backs to requiring the textbook.
My habit in uni became to start the class ignoring the required texts and then maybe get them if it turned out the class leaned on them heavily, though I sometimes also just tried making do without them if I felt like I was following the material fine without it. Most classes I just seemed to miss out on extra practice problems.
Though years later now, I do appreciate the ones that I do still have, which includes a physics book (though not the one in the OP). It means I can do refreshers rather than the entire class potentially being lost to my memory.
My Alma mater had a lot of profs who were really concerned about textbook costs. They tried to provide free PDFs as much as possible for course materials instead of books we had to buy.
But then also at this same school is a physics prof who required the exact textbook mentioned in this meme! I still have my copy at home!
As for general tuition cost inflation: that’s a very complex subject. Schools are in competition with one another to attract the best students and generally the most enrolments overall. They spend a lot of money (usually donated by rich families) building new fancy facilities and renovating existing buildings. The new buildings then need a lot of staff to maintain them as well as provide services to both students and faculty.
Over time this has led to a dramatic growth in the size of non-teaching staff at universities (administrative bloat), a major contributor to tuition cost inflation. The other major contributor is the Baumol effect, which has inflated the cost of all human-limited (as opposed to machine-limited) fields. Look at how expensive it is to get a haircut today vs 50 years ago, for example.
This sort of situation happened with one of my Calculus books in college. The new edition came out, there were no used copies yet, and e-readers didn’t yet exist so I had to buy the crazy expensive book (over $300 and that was over 20 years ago). The book store offered to buy it back for a measly $20 bucks after the class was over. I refused on general principal, I’d rather give it away to someone.
You can’t escape the laws of physics
we come in peace
shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to killIt’s worse than that. He’s dead Jim…dead Jim…dead Jim. It’s worse than that. He’s dead Jim…dead Jim…DEAD!
staaar trekking, across the universe…
For someone with such a good sense of humor, you’d think he would have written a more entertaining physics book.
Is this book good?
It’s fine, just overpriced (and kind of massive). Openstax has a comparable three volume set of books that is free.
