I don't think it's fair to say that the _whole_ textbook market is a scam to rip off students. At least nominally, the purpose of new editions of textbooks is to include information which has become relevant since the last edition was published.
I really only know one textbook author, Stuart Russell, who is writing a new edition of a textbook. He's taken a significant amount of time to revise old chapters and write entirely new chapters to include in his book, which is the most widely-used textbook on artificial intelligence. It's not just a renumbering of the end-of-chapter quiz questions.
In relatively new and diverse fields like AI, research results become standard practice fairly quickly, so textbooks have a legitimate need to be updated.
That's exactly what Google is arguing. It would be too much cents.
I don't think it's fair to say that the _whole_ textbook market is a scam to rip off students. At least nominally, the purpose of new editions of textbooks is to include information which has become relevant since the last edition was published.
I really only know one textbook author, Stuart Russell, who is writing a new edition of a textbook. He's taken a significant amount of time to revise old chapters and write entirely new chapters to include in his book, which is the most widely-used textbook on artificial intelligence. It's not just a renumbering of the end-of-chapter quiz questions.
In relatively new and diverse fields like AI, research results become standard practice fairly quickly, so textbooks have a legitimate need to be updated.
I believe distrust predated *this* option. I mean a good-old-fashioned sense of skepticism about how much privacy you can really have on the internet.
I heard about this earlier this afternoon. I talked to Jim Gray just two weeks ago, when he came up to visit Berkeley.
:-/
I really hope they find him. After over 24 hours missing, though, the outlook isn't looking good