Tag Archives: textbooks

It’s Text Selection Time of Year

If your school is like mine, the university bookstore is clamoring for textbook selections to be announced for the coming year.  To that end, I want to add my voice to the many who are urging faculty to consider free … Continue reading

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Going Free

I’m starting to get more and more email traffic that puts me in contact with people or organizations who are taking concrete steps to implement an overall strategy for the adoption of free and/or open source textbooks.  This post is … Continue reading

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Chronicle Articles on Textbooks, E-Books, and More

My friend and colleague Robert Talbert recently pointed me to a big collection of articles over at the Chronicle that are focused on the many issues surrounding textbooks on college campuses.  Lots of worthwhile reading there. One article asks about … Continue reading

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Secondary Public Offering: thru integral calculus

As promised last week, here is , now with four additional chapters that can be used for the second semester of university calculus. The link above is to the full text, all of chapters 1-8, as a Google document that … Continue reading

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Textbook Inflation

A recent US News and World Report article focuses on the high rate at which textbook costs have been rising and explains how the costs are divided among bookstores and textbook companies. While overall inflation is currently low, not so … Continue reading

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Opening Week

(This post was originally titled “Opening Day.”  Given that the entire week rushed by before I could post it, I updated.) Classes started this past Monday at GVSU.  It has been the usual whirlwind getting things organized and started for … Continue reading

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Existing Free (or Very Low Cost) Calculus Texts

One of the overwhelming things about the Internet (to me, at least) is just trying to keep track of what’s out there.  With this post, I invite readers to contribute to a list of free (and where fitting, open) calculus … Continue reading

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A different challenge to publishers

From Insider Higher Ed, an interesting article on the startup “Boundless Learning”, which endeavors to provide text-like materials to students free of charge. “It does so, essentially, through reverse engineering — identifying widely used textbooks in certain fields (three last … Continue reading

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The cost of calculus texts

As fall semester begins and students return to campus, I can’t help but reflect on the cost of textbooks, and challenge myself to think about how this affects my students and me. Data from the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences … Continue reading

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