Re:The rise of remote work may reshape college towns
by sidpatil on Saturday June 05, 2021 @06:53AM
(#27403894)
I suppose it depends on the material. Textbooks for intro-level general courses (e.g. calculus, physics, statistics, etc.) tend to get republished yearly.
Since the fundamentals of the material are unlikely to change within the span of a year, the revisions to the textbooks are mostly cosmetic in nature—updated graphic design, rearranged problem sets (to deter the used book market), etc.
Also note: I'm speaking about the US. Things could very well be different elsewhere.
Implausible in the extreme to have forty or so copies of a book?
And most textbooks aren’t republished every year. You can use them from one year to the next. Why would they be worthless at the end of the term?
Think of a classic CS text like the Dragon Book. They’re on the second edition since 1986.