Oleg's Big Party

Even better are the “Special Cornell Edition” textbooks, of which our Cornell Store is the sole distributor of. The best example is the textbook for introductory chemistry; the same Olmsted & Williams that you use at the University of Toronto for your introductory chemistry class. So what’s the difference between the Cornell Edition (TM) Olmsted and Williams and the standard edition? Well, in the Cornell Edition, a few pages have been cut out and replaced with black and white photocopied pages of the same size. Yes, my friends, this entitles Cornell to charge something on the scale of $150 USD to amazon.com’s more “reasonable” $132.95. Might I add that the Olmsted and Williams textbook is one of the worst chemistry textbooks I have ever seen.

But the shameless highway robbery of the textbook market doesn’t end there. Take, for example, the Purcell Electromagnetism book that I talked about a little while back. amazon.com’s price is $103.44, much cheaper than the Cornell Store’s $154.50. As we clearly see, the university is taking great advantage of the on-campus store - after all, if you buy from the store, you know you’ll be getting the right “edition” of the textbook.

Textbook companies aren’t helping much with this price inflation either. There are two big problems that must be dealt with. First is the virtual monopoly a textbook company has with respect to its textbooks. The second is the profusion of new editions that plague the market.

If your professor chooses a textbook for a course, then the students of the course will, of course, have to buy the textbook. This practically allows the company to charge whatever it wants for that textbook. After all, the sales of the textbook are in no way related to the price. You don’t need Introduction to Economics to figure out what an excellent opportunity for businesses this is.

Let’s take a look at introductory calculus for a moment now. We can say with historical certainty that the calculus of integrals and differentials invented by Newton and Leibniz in the late 1600s hasn’t changed much since then. After all, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is still the same Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. So why do we need a rehash of it year after year? Adams Fifth Edition, Stewart Fifth Edition, and the endless books that we had in high school… every semi-decent university calculus lecturer seems to have their own two cents about d(fg)/dx = f’g + fg’. And it seems that those two cents seem to change as rapidly as the US Mint’s coinage. Every year, on the year, the writers write and the publishers publish a new two cents on a basic rule that hasn’t changed for at least 300 years. Keeping up with their spiffy new editions (sarcasm fully intended) becomes a high-cost enterprise for students, considering how the previous edition ends up as recycling paper to print the new textbooks.

Well, I have to go now and put up my new collection of winter tinder on my bookshelf.