As a freshman, I had to buy a calculus textbook. Now, this was introductory calculus, pretty much the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented and nothing else. It's been the same for centuries.
But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up.
I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.
Yeah, predatory practices like these remove all sense of remorse I have when borrowing a PDF from someone else's hard drive. No one should respect companies and institutions that are just out to shaft everyone.
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.
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.
> 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.
Money is supposed to represent production (agricultural, industrial and services) and it's usage is a way we invented to share a country production between the participants.
The fact that you can claim a part of the production without producing yourself is silly (and necessary since we age), but that's how the system work.
Now, the morality of how you do it, wether you are doing that by owning land, owning stuff already made, scamming old people, receiving government pensions or using predatory endeavors to capture money from a captive public, doesn't come from the system. This morality we decide collectively by voting laws an politicians who have a view on the question. There, you can have socialist, liberal or conservative morality (and a few other) to choose what is acceptable or not. For example, conservative are deontologists (in my country) while you have a mix of deontologism and nihilism amongst people on the far right (and far, far left).
All that to say you probably aren't an Uber -capitalist (i had a whole paragraph to explain what it meant to me and that this doesn't exist anymore in developed countries, but i had to go deep and it wasn't that interesting)
But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up.
I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.