4 ms·
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books
by bambax 4y ago
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too.
As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
- Joker_vD 4y agoTeaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
- asimovfan 4y agoWhy? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
- anonymousab 4y agoI would assume they need to hand in the book itself for grading/verifying those exercises. Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
- HarryHirsch 4y agoA third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook. That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
- bambax 4y agoThere's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster. Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
- withinboredom 4y agoBack in the day, it cost $0.05-0.10 a copy at the student library, sometimes even free, if you knew the guy/gal working that day. I suppose with the internet being in the palm of your hand, there’s less reasons to be in the library, but back in the day, you’d be in the library 2-3 times a week.
- goosedragons 4y agoA looot of universities use online homework tools from the big textbook publishers especially for first year classes. Each new book has a code the students can use to access the homework included. Buy a used book and you now need $80 or whatever code often making it more than the new book. Worst part is there is open source tools that are similar but take effort to setup and host so universities don't use them.