Are books updated to give an excuse to charge students more?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Paul Levy [plevy () citizen org]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:28 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Are books updated to give an excuse to charge students more?

slightly corrected to fix typo in subject line, and to snip out parts of message to which I respond


I cannot speak to the current market in textbooks, but for about ten years, from the mid-80's to the mid-90's,  I was 
the overall editor of a looseleaf labor law treatise.  The publisher (a company since absorbed by larger fish) required 
us to produce looseleaf replacements on a regular basis, with a certain minimum number of pages per release.  When 
certain areas did not change enough to produce replacement pages, we were encouraged to find appendix materials that 
could be added or replaced.  And when this lagged at various points, I was told in no uncertain terms that if we did 
not produce a sufficient volume of releases, sufficient to justify continuing profits at the expense of current 
subscribers, the publisher was going to drop the book.

________________________________________
From: Mary Shaw [mary.shaw () gmail com]
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2008 10:06 PM
To: Sunil Garg; David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] The real meaning of the Act of 'Civil Disobedience'

snip

As for frequently-changing editions, it's gratuitous to suggest that they're changed solely to force students to buy 
new books. Particularly in computer science, the material changes.  For some large freshman courses, 
university-specific editions are sometimes printed to keep the size and cost of the book down by including only the 
chapters required for the course.

snip

Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 - 20th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/litigation



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