On Textbooks
Small Business Management: an Entrepreneurial Emphasis, by Longenecker, Moore, Petty, Palich
This is the textbook for the ENTR 335 class. I am somewhat disappointed by it because I was hoping for something a little more detailed, but this book seems to focus more on relentless boosterism and extolling the glories of owning or starting your own business. I was taking that part as a given, and wanted more gritty details. The appendixes offer that, but they are a brief part of the book.
I haven’t yet had a chance to go through the cd yet, or the video courses that the publisher offers on their site (http://www.intelecom.org) so I don’t know whether they “add value” to the text. The book is organized with a lot of textblocks, sidebars, simple graphics, and anecdotal stories. It is bright and colorful, and there are no heavy blocks of text.
Is it worth buying? Well, it’s a required text. More on that later.
The Sum Up: This book wishes really badly that it was on the web. It wants to be new media so badly.
Microsoft Office 2007: Second Custom Edition: cs101 introduction to computer applications, by various authors
This text is a collection of chapters and sections from other textbooks on MS Office, published specifically for the University. I was supremely unimpressed by this book, but perhaps that is because I am not the target audience for the book. The book is a collection of descriptions of tasks, interspersed with small vignettes of why you’d like to do those tasks.
Like most computer application books, it is boring and ill-suited to the task. This is the kind of thing that small videos and tutorial programs are so superior to text that I expect this to be a soon-to-be extinct market.
I purchased the last version of the book, not because it was required, but because it was bundled with software that was. If I had been able to skip the book, I would have.
The Sum Up: boring, ignorable, and ultimately useless.
Textbooks are big racket these days. They are large, pretty books, with a small audience, that often is forced to purchase them. The used market is often artificially constrained. This is not a recipe for low prices. I am looking forward to the developments by the Wikimedia project for developing open source textbooks.
Advances in art history, french, and algebra are progressing slowly enough, I dare say, that new editions of text books aren’t required every year. Establishing a stable corpus of academic literature will be the culmination of a dream attempted by Diderot so many years ago, and I think it is attainable quite soon. Subjects that DO have substantial changes year to year will only benefit from online distribution.
I predict that in less than 10 years, E-textbooks will become common. It will be a superior model, and with luck, it won’t be locked up in horrible DRM or “Bundles” or subscriptions. Free and open textbooks will be a good thing for students.
The current model doesn’t serve students very well, and I doubt that publishers actually make much money off them. The sooner professors adopt an open-source model for text books, the better for academia.