
Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers' - robotrout
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
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las3rjock
I remember that chapter from _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_ quite well.
One of my favorite passages is the following, which is the source of the title
of the chapter:

    
    
      We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by
      the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
    
      I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."
    
      Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"
    
      "I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."
    
      The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain
      that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet.
      There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the
      publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers,
      and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and
      hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third
      one would be late."
    
      It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They
      couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the
      rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The
      fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.

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csmeder
My guess is that some day students will use e-readers to view books that are
created under the Creative Commons license. When will that day come? Not soon
enough...

Two things are required for this to happen:

1)There has to be a Mark Shuttleworth of text book collaboration.

2)e-readers need to have color, be 8x10 and some what cheap.

Part II is basically done. Any successful founders want to do part 1?

~~~
jeremymcanally
The big problem is getting people with credentials to write the books. School
systems have to worry about that sort of stuff, and usually these people want
a good chunk of $$$ to participate in the long process of creating a textbook.

