From: seeta@eng.wayne.edu (Seetamraju UdayaBhaskar Sarma)
Subject: Re: High Prices of Math Books. I am pissed
Reply-To: seeta@eng.wayne.edu
Organization: College of Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan, USA
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 15:51:50 GMT


If people in japan are cribbing about high proces of text books, then imagine
the troubles of the rest of the third world...

With a lousy economic situation, even US students can rightly crib about high prices...


Recently, a grad.course here : on stochastic processes, used a text by eugene wong
(of berkeley).  A ~100 page book, slimmer than a HP calculator : lousy type setting...

supposed to be lecture notes :  was typed on a stupid standard typewriter by another
of those ubiquitous dept'al secretaries : almost all equations had to be reedited by
springer verlag and put in proper format.  Even then the book sucks in looks...

A math book : that too on probability THEORY ; typed using a stupid standard typewriter.
That too from berkeley....!!  (Hmmm.  the economy must be real bad..!!)

It costs $40..   But it was one heck of a lecture notes...

pathetic state of math textbooks.....,


Seetamraju Udaya Bhaskar Sarma
(email : seetam @ ece7 . eng . wayne . edu)


In article 3800@tansei1.tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp, mhiroshi@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp (H. Murakami) writes:
-+>
-+>	The practice of selling something in high price domestically, 
-+>and in cheap at foreign should be called "dumping", and may be 
-+>called as an unfair trading.
-+>
-+>They may say the hard cover and paper back are different,
-+>however I mainly purchase for the content, not for the cover.
-+>
-+>	Hiroshi Murakami
-+>	mhiroshi@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
-+>
-+>PS.
-+>	The Western book publisher in recent years establish their
-+>branch in Japan, and distribution of the books are dominated through
-+>their channel. We usually find they use the currency conversion rate
-+>around 200yens/dollar or more (the true rate is 125yen/dollars). 
-+>Even we try to order to the US book publisher directly expecting
-+>to get the 125yen/dollar rating of the prices, what those publisher
-+>will do to us is just ignore the order or circulate the order to
-+>those Japanese branch which we would not want to.
-+>
-+>The only way to escape these dirty practice is order the books
-+>not the the publisher directly but order a book seller in USA
-+>who is not controlled by the publishing jiants.
-+>
-+>PS2.
-+>
-+>The book publisher is the publisher. 
-+>Their purpose is primaly for money making.
-+>If by raising the price will totally increase the profit,
-+>the price will be raised.
-+>
-+>The original purpose of the publising the books was not
-+>to make the books as the material or good, nor for the profit of
-+>the publisher, but the exchange or distribution of the ideas or
-+>knowledges especially for the academic books.
-+>If the academy is for the development of the knowledge and also
-+>the making easy access of the knowledge, the electorical publication
-+>should be encoraged.
-+>
-+>The Americal Mathematical Society pushing the use of TeX. 
-+>
-+>For the evaluation of the authors, for the same quality of works, 
-+>the electorical free of charge publications (like anonymous ftp-able) 
-+>should be evaluated higher than the books which is usually not free-to-copy. 
-+>In that case, the author did not want the money by publication
-+>but the fame, and that kind of circulations would help poors.
-+>
-+>As the mathematics has long history, many respectable author's 
-+>copyrights of books or the papers were already expired.
-+>I do hope those things will be available in CD-ROM like
-+>10 dollar/CD that contains equivalent of 100 books.
-+>
-+>Imagine Gauss's werke or Riemann's or Hilbert's , etc.. free ftp-able,
-+>or a 10 dollar CD contains full of Burubaki's books, so on.
-+>




Newsgroups: sci.math