this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
700 points (96.8% liked)

Asklemmy

44176 readers
2036 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

worse than that is professors being required by the school's contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it's awful. that was way way more common for me.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.

Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject. Like we're talking using scientific data from 1995 at the latest, and I took this class 2 years ago. He sent a bunch of emails to the textbook author and eventually he came out with a "Fourth Edition" in response that changed NOTHING. The book was exactly the same except for a different cover. It was so bad that in the syllabus our professor warned us not to buy the fourth edition for the hefty $70 upcharge because it's the same thing as the third edition.