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Calculus Textbook Author James Stewart Has Died
Onnimikki writes James Stewart, author of the calculus textbooks many of us either loved or loved to hate, has died. In case you ever wondered what the textbook was funding, this story has the answer: a $32 million dollar home over-looking a ravine in Toronto, Canada.
rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
Rewrite? As in actually revise the text? No way.
I teach out of a thermodynamics text that gets churned every year or so. Never mind that engineering thermodynamics hasn't changed a whit in about a century, but the homework problems get reshuffled. Once in a while they'll actually try to rewrite some of the homework problems, mangling them badly. I redo all of the problems to ensure that the solutions are actually correct (many are not). I'm actually writing many of my own homework problems now and allowing students to purchase any edition of the text that they can find (as the 3rd edition is effectively as good as the 8th edition as far as being a reference to solve problems).
It's pissing me and the students off because they really do need to have a text. However, this churning bullshit and jacking up of prices is actually causing some of the students to try to wing it through the class without a text, which is not going to end well They do need a basic reference for exams and practical problems. But they could probably do fine with a text from 1920 if they were comfortable using it.
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers. Shoot the bastards into space and be done with them.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
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You wouldn't want people studying Calculus in 2014 from a 1998 book. It would obviously be outdated with all that has changed.
I mean there was the... umm.. and the...
Really though, the last ethics class I took required an e-book with a 3 use license and six month expiration that cost $130. So, after six months, there is no access to the material at all, like a returned library book without even the value of a paper-bound book that could be burned for warmth.
vi? Who's that?
When I studied calculus the hardest part was studying calculus, not buying the book. Textbooks were a lot cheaper.
Even cheaper, my math teacher used to organize book-buying from Taiwan.
At that time (1959), there was no copyright agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan (and besides, they were fighting Communism), so it was completely legal.
They cost about a tenth of U.S. prices. The publisher he used had reprints of all the popular math and science books (like Dover, except not limited to to public domain). They had an entire Encyclopedia Britannica for about $25.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
So the great classics, like Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (the world's largest-selling physics textbook), are now out of print, even though Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad.
The other source of cheap textbooks was the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, which translated all the great Soviet science and math textbooks, including Perelman's, into every major language of the world, including English, and sold them cheaply everywhere. They were even cheaper than Dover, $2 apiece. And the Soviets didn't believe in copyright, so Dover or anybody could reprint them. I've heard Indian scientists reminisce about how they grew up reading Perelman as children.
It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive until the Internet. They could have put all their scientific, literary and music works online copyright-free.
Perhaps you can feel better knowing that he has given the entire proceedings from the sale of the house to a variety of charities.
His textbook will long remain one of the best, for its completeness and clarity of exposition. As for the price of my copy, it was worth every penny.
Check out openstax, they are writing pre-reviewed professional open source textbooks ( Creative Commons ) and were funded by Gates, I think the last round of funding got them $10 million for another ten books. http://openstaxcollege.org/books