From: gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk (G.J. McCaughan)
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Re: High Prices of Math Books. I am pissed.
Date: 7 Jan 93 17:05:36 GMT
Organization: U of Cambridge, England

In article <BEVAN.93Jan6215256@panda.cs.man.ac.uk> bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) writes:
>In article <1993Jan6.151149.7824@infodev.cam.ac.uk> gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk (G.J. McCaughan) writes:
>
>   There is much to be said for providing education on equal terms for
>   all, or at least for discriminating on the basis of ability rather
>   than of wealth.  And it can be done without bankrupting the
>   government; the UK has had such a system for ages, and it has
>   worked all right.
>
>I think the current government might disagree with your analysis, or
>they wouldn't have introduced a partial loans scheme to save
>themselves money.

The system has been in operation for many years, and the government
hasn't gone bankrupt. Yes, the current government is decreasing its
spending on education; to my mind, this merely indicates that they
don't care much about it. Their reforms to the primary and secondary
education systems are consistent with this hypothesis, if what I've
heard from my many acquaintances who are teachers is anything to go
by, and if they had anything to do with the various bits of syllabus
I've seen.

>                   As to the subject line: each new intake of students
>complains about the price of books (I'm sure I did).  

There are two possible explanations for this: (i) students whinge a lot,
or (ii) books are too expensive. (Or both, of course). I don't think the
fact that all students complain about book prices proves that they are
wrong.

>                                                      If you can't
>afford a book, borrow it from a friend, club together with others and
>buy one copy between you or make friends with a rich student and
>borrow all their books :-)  Alternatly try asking a faculty member or a
>graduate student if they are willing to lend out their books.
>Personally I'm not so keen on this since the some of the books I
>lent out came back looking rather worse for wear, but with enough
>begging and promises to treat the book with reference, you might get
>lucky.

I'm not at all convinced by the book-sharing idea: unless you and your
friends all live within a minute's walk of each other, and are always
in when the book is needed, it's going to be a pain; and what happens
when the N people involved stop living in the same place?

Borrowing is all very well, but remember the remarks that have been
made above: being able to borrow a book is not nearly so good as having
it available at all times. As for "a rich student" -- well, over here
in the UK you can just about fill two short shelves with about 1500 pounds'
worth of mathematics textbooks. They'd have to be very rich.

If you're talking about long-term borrowing -- (i) a counting argument
shows that this can only work for a small-ish number of students; (ii)
most faculty members and graduate students have more sense than to lend
out a significant fraction of their books to people they don't know
quite well.

Yes, I know, I'm moaning. But even if there is no solution to the problem,
it should at least be admitted that the problem of text-book prices is a
real one.
-- 
Gareth McCaughan     Dept. of Pure Mathematics & Mathematical Statistics,
gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk  Cambridge University, England.    [Research student]