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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.
I have a hard time feeling anything for someone who contributed thousands to college students financial aid bills while build a house worth that much.
Somehow I greatly resent people who profit massively from kids' math textbooks. He was such a person.
Here's a picture of some Indian kids using a bridge as a school.
Wonder how much toll Stewart would feel they should pay him for the privilege of learning stuff invented by Newton.
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Environment/Pix/pictures/2013/9/18/1379522585111/Indian-children-attend-a--008.jpg
That's the dirty little secret in all this.
Success in textbook publishing has more to do with getting institutions to force a particular textbook on their students then it does writing books that actually help those students.
There are more than a few rich academics that have figured out how to jump on that gravy train that is modern education.
We were warned years ago about the military-industrial complex. There's also the political-academic complex to worry about, too.
Pro tip: financial success has everything to do with persuading people to give you money.
I really fucking hate this about academia. It's absolutely shameless to charge college students $244 for a single dumb textbook. It's not even that good. It's just that when a department chooses to standardize on a textbook, the move has inertia and is basically impossible to reverse. Then, the publisher can charge something absurd, and everybody pays it, because it is a required text. It's so dirty, because it's profiteering from people who are often barely making ends meet, and typically buying the book with debt.
What really bothers me is that nobody seems willing to do anything about it. If a big, publicly funded university system set aside some money to create and regularly update their core STEM curriculum textbooks - let's start with Calculus, Physics, GenChem, GenBio - it would certainly cost less than the almost $1000 per student that the textbook purchases cost. These universities have Nobel Prize winners among their faculty, surely they have the in-house resources to create excellent textbooks and distribute them on some sort of open license like CC. Arranging sabbaticals for the authors might cost at most a million dollars, or roughly 4000 Stewart Calculus books. That might be about the number of Calc 1, Phys 1, GenChem and GenBio books that are sold on a single campus in a single year.
But this move would help everybody, not just within the entire UC system that funded the effort, but across the globe. And the costs of updating and embellishing future editions would be far less. I'm so mad that a large university system doesn't just make this happen. And yes, raise fucking tuition by $200 to pay for it, if you absolutely have to. In exchange for textbooks you can have for free (or for printing cost if you don't like digital), everybody will recognize that's a great deal. The courses can explicitly invite students to devise problems for future editions, or to suggest changes and clarifications. And it will bring prestige to the colleges and to the authors, which is worth something too.
Agreed, but I actually don't get paid to publish. I am at a teaching college, and I teach a very full load plus do a number of administrative duties.
Your idea is good, but the unfortunate thing is that anyone who puts that much effort into writing a text is eventually drawn to trying to monetizing it, either themselves or by the institution itself. Also, many accreditation organizations want to see mainstream textbooks used. Nothing technically says you need these books, but things suddenly get difficult during accreditation when they start seeing locally published texts on display. Same with printing off a text from 1920 - completely usable and accurate text, but try to defend the use of a century old text when new textbooks are available? Do you want to risk your program's accreditation because of that?
And this is before all the bullshit you need to wade through with the school bookstore trying to turn a buck. I got yelled at for recommending to my students to buy the course text online vs. going through the bookstore ($40-$60 bucks vs $250 at the bookstore for the same text).
College isn't about learning anymore, it's all about making money.
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Well, it seems we're disregarding the actual story in lieu of bitching about textbooks. So here's my story of interest:
My own stupid textbook story is from Statics. The prof listed a textbook, title, version and ISBN. I ordered online to save some cash, everyone else bought from the campus bookstore.
About two weeks in, I've failed every homework problem. Turns out the version that was listed, and the version I had bought, was the METRIC version, while the campus bookstore had ordered the IMPERIAL version, which everyone else, including the professor, had (I checked the ISBNs, mine was right, so either they have two versions under the same number, or the bookstore "corrected" it to the imperial version). The problems were the same, save for the units.
Brief aside: Why the hell is there even an engineering textbook in non-metric units? Who the hell is designing bridges in feet, pounds and slugs? It's probably just to keep American students from buying cheaper foreign copies.
In any case, we worked out a deal - I just copied the text of the problem before showing my work. My grade instantly shot up. Not quite to an A- despite having passed an "Algebra and Trigonometry" class, I'd never actually been taught trig, and was trying to learn it independently for both Statics and Calc II.