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Re: High-priced textbooks

We gave very serious consideration to adopting the text for this fall. It
seems very well written to me, and the price is right! However, the version
we reviewed had no HW problems with it; we still considered it heavily!
However, in the end, we considered the burden of writing our own problem
sets as too great, combined with another choice that we liked a lot
(expensive though). I heard that the newest version of the text (Madison
AAPT attendees?) does have some back of chapter problems. This would remove
one of the major concerns we had.

(The other concern was a desire of some faculty to use the WEBASSIGN
facilties at NCState and this book obviously at the time didn't have
problems keyed into their site. We gave some consideration to simply
choosing problems from another text and using those for Web Assignments and
thus solving somewhat the problem of no problems in the text.)

Joel

-----Original Message-----
From: Laurent Hodges [mailto:lhodges@IASTATE.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 11:37 AM
To: PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu
Subject: High-priced textbooks


The New York Times today (September 16, 2003) has an article
about the high
price of college textbooks. Indeed they are atrocious -
typically $150 now
for introductory physics. For several years I have not used
textbooks in
the introductory courses I've taught, preferring to make
notes and problem
sets available online as pdf files. This is partly because the high
prices don't seem justified to me, and partly because the large, wordy
textbooks make it difficult for the students to "see the
forest for the
trees," in my opinion. They are the printed equivalent of
the passive
lectures.

A step in the right direction might be E. R. Huggins' Physics
2000 textbook
(see http://www.physics2000.com), which is available for $10
on CD or for
$25 as CD plus two printed volumes. Has anyone used this textbook?

I'd be interested in the opinions of other physics teachers
on this subject.