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To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. I ca

To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. I can almost tolerate the exorbitant costs of textbooks on the basis of the existence of a vibrant used textbook market. But what keeps me from doing so is the lengths to which the publishers go to stamp out that used market, without any concomitant reductions in price. You want to play the rapidly-coming-out-with-new-editions game, the one-time-use online code game? Fine, I ain't forking out more for your textbook than any other book (that would be $20), and if you're not offering it at that price point, well, the $0 you're getting instead should be sufficient comfort.

sitkack 4y ago
> I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/... https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracticalman https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracti... New isn't better, old isn't worse.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
My counter argument is that the pedagogy is primarily with the teachers/professors and the lessons themselves. Granted, the textbooks do contain information about how to go about solving the problems. But in my experience the textbooks primarily functioned as a repository of to-do math problems. Given that math problems cannot be copyrighted, I really feel like most of these textbooks have content for the sake of making the book intellectual property and such fluff is ignored by most classes.

sitkack 4y ago

> I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/... https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracticalman https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracti... New isn't better, old isn't worse.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

My counter argument is that the pedagogy is primarily with the teachers/professors and the lessons themselves. Granted, the textbooks do contain information about how to go about solving the problems. But in my experience the textbooks primarily functioned as a repository of to-do math problems. Given that math problems cannot be copyrighted, I really feel like most of these textbooks have content for the sake of making the book intellectual property and such fluff is ignored by most classes.