*controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy) - requested by MrFisk.

Interesting. When I was in college, I got good mileage out of (in order of preference):

1: Not buying the book listed on the syllabus at all. LOTS of courses didn't assign any homework from the book, and covered all the information that would be on tests in lectures. So I never bought a book before it became clear that I would actually have to use it.

2: Buying used books, if at all possible directly from a student who took the course the previous semester. I never ran into the "new edition" problem mentioned in the video, and my major was Computer Science, which I'd think would tend to change more in a short period of time than most disciplines.

3: Sharing a single book (and the purchase price) between 3-10 other students. Even in the few courses that did have homework (Engineering Physics and Calc 2 had a lot for me), it was quite helpful to share a book with several other students and work through the problems together whenever homework was assigned.


So this never really seemed like a big problem for me, although I guess that doesn't help much for High School textbooks, where we generally only have to pay for them in the form of taxes.

I remember having to buy new edition Calculus book ($100+) because they switched the texts between calc 2 and calc 3. Wasn't this shit invented 400 years ago? Did I really need a new book with slightly different questions? apparently so.
Meanwhile the author (Stewart) lives in a multi-million dollar ocean-front mansion on the west coast.

Fun fact: the Indian government regulates textbook costs, and even though the editions sold there are paperback only and lower-quality print, they are <1/10th the cost of western-published books with identical content. (It's illegal to export them out of India though.) Isn't it nice when a democracy works for the people rather than for corporations?

In the EU university is free in most countries..... It's great

The problem isn't the textbooks, but rather the extreme end of capitalism running rampant.

It would be interesting to see how much EU university (hidden)costs have risen in the last 10-20 years and see if they compare at all to the US experience.