International Editions differ often in the problems at the ends of the chapters in order to protect US and other western markets. Differences in the problems means it discourages students from buying things that may lead to incorrect answers to assigned problem sets.

As for things just being flat out wrong, I can only imagine this discourages US/western students from buying International Editions to save money.

I bought an international edition of a text in college because it was priced significantly cheaper. And indeed, it had all the same problems, but they had been re-arranged, so when the professor assigned problems "5-15", I needed to know the mapping from the US 5-15 to the international version's numbers. Which, by quickly thumbing through another student's copy, I could generate pretty rapidly, but boy was that annoying. (I might have reconsidered purchasing the international edition had this been disclosed at the time of sale…)

We had a professor that kept mappings for 2-3 versions behind and basically allowed you to buy the used book on Amazon for about $12 compared to $200 for the new one.

It's these little things that make your professors stand out.

> It's these little things that make your professors stand out

The calculus text at my university was a “custom” edition that came unbound and shrink-wrapped and still cost as much as a regular new text. My calculus IV professor said many times over the first week: “Do not take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson avenue and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends, because that would be illegal. I say again, I cannot advise you take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson Avenue next to Pizza Hut and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends because that is IP theft and illegal.”

Fantastic professor—I really that semester because of him.

I was not a CS major but I had a number of friends that were CS majors and one of the courses used a book written by the professor, who is also the department head. The book cost like $200-$300. It was a shitty rewrite of the Sun Java documentation with a few added exercises and some reworded bits.

Fucking racket. Also something something cheating and plagiarism is bad unless you're the head of an academic department.

>$200 for a textbook with borderline extorsion sale tactics

That's the moment I fire up libgen

b-ok.cc?

> International Editions differ often in the problems at the ends of the chapters in order to protect US and other western markets.

Protect in what way? By not disclosing secret problems based on US-centric data?

I believe edge17 means changing the exercises for the cheaper global edition, so students in western markets are forced to buy the expensive version as they may be assigned these end of chapter problem sets.

Yup, protecting in that the majority of the revenue for the publishers comes from the western markets (US/Europe).

It's the same reason companies like Apple don't sell less expensive phones less affluent markets - if they did the price spread would create an opportunity for arbitrageurs. Google et al however, does create less expensive alternative versions of their products for other markets.

I bought a mechanical engineering book, and I found the rent seeking quite clever: the international version(this one was targeted for the Indian market) did not have American units, only SI.

The rest of the world uses SI units, why would you expect anything else in the international edition?

it's the link with money that I found interesting, $100 for the american units (I mean American book have problems in both system of units, aerospace, military and engineering for science tend to work in metric) and $30 for the SI unit only.

Because any competent engineer should be able to work with both interchangeably.

And almost all of the world uses SI units, so why would you expect anything else in the international edition?

I.e, all you've given us is a reason to only ever use SI. Which isn't really what your intention was, was it?

(I'm aware non SI is useful in some contexts.)

Which contexts?

I used to be a physicist so voodoo around constants so that we end up mass having energy units was common but I cannot think off my head of problems better where imperial units are easier. There are certainly, I am genuinely curious which.

Well, it's easy to remember that the speed of light is roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight...

I thought it was a joke but it is not. And "roughly" here is actually "very close to".

Now I know what imperial units are useful for, thanks.

If you ask any competent engineer in Australia to work with imperial units, they will go whaaat.

If you ask any competent engineer outside the US to work with imperial units, they will go whaaat.

I published a technical book in the late 90s and the publisher (Pearson) opted to have it translated into a number of other (non-English) languages. I was never told anything about the translations. My assumption was that they used some sort of "contract translation people/service" and just "crank them out". My guess is they aren't that focused on quality. When my book was first published, technical books were much more profitable, but since then publishers have really struggled. The publisher I worked with was fantastic at the time, but since then has repeatedly stated they just want to "get books out there" regardless of the quality. And, I think the market was already tanking by the time my book was translated, so I'm pretty sure quality wasn't a priority for them. They sent me an after-the-fact sample copy of 2-3 of the languages it was translated into, but it was a total surprise to me and I never received any information about the process or that it was happening. In fact, it was so hands off that I have no idea if they translated it into more languages and never sent me a copy.

Another factor why the authors the OP contacted may not care could be that the royalty rates were dramatically lower for International sales -- at least that was the case for my book -- I essentially made nothing. I'm not saying people write books only for profit, but the combination of "not even knowing they were translated" with "zero profit motive" makes a potent combination. :-)

That being said, I don't believe anyone every contacted me with errata on a translated edition... I guess I should consider myself lucky. :-)

Interesting, I know nothing about publishing but this some good insight to having your text manipulated by said publishers. Thanks for comment

That book seems quite highly recommended but I remember glancing through it and even the US edition had lots of seemingly random but consistent capitalisation errors in the code examples, like someone had autocorrect/autoformat turned on throughout, which IMHO is enough to make me not recommend it --- it's already hard enough for a beginner to use correct code, nevermind code with such errors.

It worked well for my goal of satisfying the prereqs of Knuth that the reader is expected to have written a few programs already, which I presume means writing in an assembly language. Another book that could be used instead is 'Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware Software Interface (RISC-V Edition)' and MIT has lectures for it on youtube https://6004.mit.edu/web/spring19/resources/lectures should anybody else want to learn.

Editing is incredibly hard -- your brain tends to see what should be there and not what's there. Good copyeditors read syllable by syllable to break this up. (I am a tech editor, not a copy editor.)

I’m sorry you got such a shitty reply to what must have been a lot of hard work.

Did you try to contact the Malaysian professors?

Regardless, thank you for the warning about international editions.

I probably should have contacted them. The completely untrustworthy answers/exercises turned out to be somewhat of a blessing in disguise as I ended up really learning the material being that I had to figure out everything myself and carefully step through exercises to find the error. However I had luxury of free time to do so and wasn't panicking under pressure of a class schedule and this text is used for a lot of undergrad courses.

The international edition of that book costs almost 1/4th of the US edition and is still pretty expensive as books go.

It likely means they dont have a direct contract with the authors and you are better off contacting them directly instead.