Hey, nobody offered me $8000, or Absolutely my final posting on textbook prices

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In the spirit of Bullwinkle, I think that all blog entries should be required to have two titles. . . .

Anyway, Seth linked to this amusing note by Preston McAfee.

P.S. In a comment to my earlier entry, somebody linked to McAfee's free introductory economics textbook. I started reading it, and it seems great so far. Maybe if I'd read a book like this thirty years ago I would've become an economist. Or maybe not, I dunno. It's not like my statistics textbooks were so delightful; I just liked the subject. And I've never read a poli sci textbook in my life.

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Sadly, even if you accepted such a bribe, the money would not be enough to purchase Chemical Shifts and Coupling Constants for Silicon-29. Now there's a book price that cries out for explanation! (Read the reviews -- they're hilarious.)

Academic books go out of print relatively quickly -- I think publishers make money on the initial (library) run, and then get it off their books. So I retrieved the copyright from two of my books (on recidivism and crime mapping), scanned them, and made them available on my website under a Creative Commons (some rights reserved) copyright. Of course, they're not textbooks, so the economics are different.

A Pie chart we can all love:

http://maryandmatt.net/store/cpc.html

(I don't recall where I learned about this, don't think it was you).

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