Posted on 03/31/2010 6:57:04 AM PDT by Sopater
bump
I answered, above. It’s basically an attack on publishers who “bundle” their workbooks/DVDs with textbooks to make more $. This doesn’t appear to be an issue about content. It will only hurt the textbook publishers more, since they get most of their profit from the add-ons. And this is good, since they are all so biased.
btt
“this Federal Textbook Act could easily eliminate this ... source of income for professors “
Quite the contrary, professors who toe the line will be subsidized. They will then become lazy and just print the cliches and plagiarized passages of others already approved for subsidy. Supply will increase to meet the money available.
But quality will decrease. For example, they won’t even do a quality job of covering Keynesian economics.
The excuse is that this will prevent textbook publishers from jacking up rates between editions with meaningless changes. Just as with nationalizing student lending to “save money”, this is a fig leaf for indoctrination of children from 3 to 22.
Thank you for the heads’ up about Der Fuher wannabe.
Hillsdale or Patrick Henry.
While this could be a power-grab, I think the purpose of knowing what the revisions are is so that students can know if they *need* the revised edition, or if they are just fine with the previous edition. Many publishers will put out a new edition of their textbook and change practically nothing. This keeps the used textbook market starved for copies, so they sell more new ones. This way, students can read for themselves “we changed the font size to screw up the page numbering and make it look like a real new edition” and know that they can safely buy the previous edition.
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