Re: Textbooks @Kernel
And increasingly academia is getting fed up with over greedy publishers. These days self publishing a complicated bit of typesetting is becoming trivially simple, I suspect in some cases as easy or easier than going through a traditional publisher.
It often goes something like this:
"Oh - and you'll need a copy of my new textbook <Fancy Title on obscure topic>. Go grab yourself a copy a copy off my bit of the UNIVERSITY WEBSITE. Here's the URL. If you really want a printed copy go ahead - it's Creative Commons, but it's 1257 pages . I've tried to make most of it readable in black and white but ideally you'd like at least some pages in colour. Print the bits you need. Or you can buy a bound copy from LULU. But be warned that I tend to update it quite frequently."
There's a difference between a new edition because it's needed and changing the exercises to make using an old edition deliberately difficult.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
