Re: SICP Strangeness...


Ulrich Hobelmann wrote:
> casioculture@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > But it's not necessarily a bad policy. It's a companion textbook to a
> > course, not a mass readership book. I find the $80 pretty cheap for a
> > hardcover academic book, and especially this one. Libraries prefer
> > their books hardcover as they can endure abuse and constant borrowing
> > by students. I also find it understandable that they won't sell the
> > instructors book, as that may compromise in-course assessment or tests,
> > and an institution like MIT can't have the reputation of its assessment
> > process questioned.
>
> But $40 MORE for the hardcover is veeery much. And it's mostly the US
> system that encourages high prices: in Germany there aren't really
> mandatory textbooks chosen by the school, so there is no lobbying by the
> textbook vendors. And because schools don't buy huge chunks of
> textbooks, but everything resembles more of a free market (i.e.
> students, not the school and the lobby choose) books are much cheaper.
> In the US my French textbook was $80, and the softcover exercise book
> $50, in Germany now it's ?17 (but softcover) and ?8. Ok, we too have
> crappy publishers that sell hardcover books for $100 (Kluwer), and some
> of them are written in really crappy English (such as the German author
> I'm reading right now).
>

Yeah, I totally agree that academic books should be cheap, or
preferably even free. But my point was that compared to American
publishers the MIT press price of $80 was not excessive; I remember 3
years ago being told by an American exchange student that a general
chemistry undergraduate textbook was $160 and it was required by the
American university. Nothing special about it and it wasn't a classic
like SICP, and it wasn't available online as SICP is. My point was that
the MIT guys are not bad, they're pretty reasonable. They made the book
available online for free and even in videos, and hence the hardcover
will likely be wanted by libraries that would want to lend them.

In the case of SICP my suggestion if someone wants to read it away from
the computer and doesn't want to print it then a palmtop would be
useful. The open source program Plucker is pretty nice at converting
and displaying books.


> > It's true that academic books are expensive, but the market for them is
> > small, and most students don't even buy them, as they're also provided
> > in the library and taught in course, and if they do they usually buy
> > them from previous years students. Even more so for this book that's
> > available online. Those books usually take years to write, and the
> > expertise requried to write them take decades to accumulate. It's
> > certainly is not business to make one rich or one entered into for
> > profit.
>
> Yes, some books are something you buy for life. They are worth the price.
>
> --
> The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

.

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