He said that he did so in order to make sure the publishing company would keep printing them, intentionally and openly ensuring there wouldn't be a used book market. His justification is in the syllabus here https://economics.byu.edu/Documents/Syllabi%20-%20broken/201....
Looking back, and having printed a book, I'm 99% sure that's BS. Or, at best, you could print the book much cheaper yourself.
Didn't you read the PDF!?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
You could have been sued!
My best guess is he is trying to argue that if you disallowed used car sales, you'd get better economies of scale on new cars, as more would need to be produced to fill the void left my used car sales. While it might drive the price of a new car/textbook down, I still think it would drive the average amount paid by drivers/students up, which is what we really care about (as students, at least; obviously the textbook companies would love to sell more books).
In fact, this seems to a case of the broken window fallacy[1] — a textbook case, one might say. ;-) (In that, if you essentially destroy the used text book's value by not using them, that this is somehow beneficial.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
tl;dr The guy is both a tool and an idiot.
Creating things that last years, decades, generations, doesn't keep the economy "moving" in this sense. It can cause some sectors to fail (a sort of boom-bust). If you create a near perfect product that lasts decades, you have an immediate need to ramp up production (to meet demand). Once the demand tapers off due to market penetration, growth slows, and then you shrink--potentially rapidly. If the product doesn't expire frequently (break, wear out, get lost, something) and is a non-consumable good, then your production needs to drop off or you need to make different things.
I worked for an employer once that was in that situation. I saw it coming, but they straight up lied to the staff about what was coming up, how the future was great. Then we went from $500 million/year in revenue to $150 million/year because our massive ramp-up for production succeeded, now our product was in every system it needed to be in. New systems are made relatively slowly (big things, like airliners, but also smaller like military ground vehicles), and only needed our parts for maintenance (breakdown after ~10 years; maybe not break but need replacement/servicing) and the less frequent new production.
By some metrics, this was a failure of the company (in fact, the division was sold off some time later). But it actually succeeded, it needed to pivot to maintenance and divert other resources to engineering other solutions (or let them go, which is what happened to many of them). They actually have pivoted, I'm told, at least some parts of it. They're doing more diverse sets of safety critical systems, including getting into the consumer ground vehicle market now. That need to pivot should have been obvious, but for some reason it wasn't to many of my peers, and the management ignored it (willfully) at least in their presentations to us.
I had to take an economics statistics course my senior year due to some confusion over the then-newish AP Statistics exam -- I received credit, but couldn't apply it to my computer science major. The class was ridiculous, it was basically statistics 101/102, but used the first few chapters of the professor's Econometrics textbook, which sold for $150 circa 1998.
He handed out the assignments at the beginning of the semester, and you didn't need to show up except for the tests. The test used textbook questions, and asked questions that referenced passages in his stupid book, including charts in chapters that weren't covered as part of the actual class.
So Internet articles are unacceptable because "they suggest that [you are not] reading the good financial press on a daily basis" ? Is that one of the stated goals of the course -- to force you into a daily habit of reading the print version of the Wall Street Journal?
> Photocopying of Assignments from someone else’s text is a violation of copyright laws, so please purchase your own text.
Apparently he has never heard of Fair Use.
My physics class on the other hand had a book that was 'customized' for us (chapters were rearranged to prevent resale), and we had to purchase access to webassign.
In fact when I studied there was no real requirement to buy books at all. Of course most of us did spend a lot on books but it was nothing compared to the amounts I regularly see mentioned on line in discussions about US unis. It was simply convenient to use the recommended book so that lecturers could refer to chapters, formulas, and figures and so on and so that when you asked your fellow students for help that you would all be on the same page so to speak. In theory you could have got by with your own lecture notes and visits to the library.
I'm quite sure that my old copy of Lorrain and Corson would be just as good for EM part of a bachelor's in physics now as it was in 1975. In fact I think I'll dig it out and start to refresh my skills.
There's very little excuse to create new versions of a calculus textbook. My decades-old Thomas still works just fine.
The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different homework handouts each semester.
IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).
That sounds like work, we are talking about academia here.
I suspect, however, that academic publishers would attempt to sue the pants off anyone that built such a service if it relied on user submissions of content (e.g. a professor uploads their homework assignments to the library of content and that content can be utilized by anyone else on the system).
Better look into old Russian textbooks for interesting (often very hard) calculus problems.
How does a proprietary textbook solve the cheating problem? Even a new copy yearly doesn't do much of anything, students can still share answers or pay a third party to answer the questions on their behalf.
They're only hurting themselves. If they happen to get a job, they won't last long. They'll be destined to float from company to company, changing jobs when they're found to be frauds. Or, they'll actually pick up enough knowledge to hide away at some larger company.
Interviewing a bunch of incompetent applicants to find the competent one is not cheap.
That is something you could literally write once and continue to use for 100 years, tweaking only when the course requirements change. Even if you're lazy, and write all the questions and solution guides by hand, you could still select from every such question that you had ever written, and by your 20th year on the job, memorizing from the bootleg study guides would be harder than just learning the course material.
Do not all colleges have some form of honor code? Where I attended (two schools), it seemed universally understood that the Honor Code had meaning — I may have had blinders on, but I never saw evidence of cheating.
I readily admit my school's (while highly selective) were not known as cutthroat, "keep up or get out" institutions, which I'm aware is a de facto state at some places. Sadly, such rank competitiveness fosters a "need" to cheat.
Except one. This guy had been teaching for like 10 years, and put EVERY SINGLE PAST PAPER HE HAD out there. He provided students with a massive, massive stash of questions and answers.
For any given problem, you could either solve it, or you could just navigate thousands of PDFs trying to find the solution. And when you wanted to do some solo practice, you had endless options.
He reused questions from those papers in midterms, but the chances of you actually picking the right question from all the possibilities was very slim.
It's one of those situations where, paradoxically, by being completely gregarious, he achieved better results than by being ultra guarded and secretive.
Do you mean that students who choose to cheat don't learn as well? (That doesn't garner much sympathy from me.)
I'm quite confident that no one at Exeter Uni. in 1977 could have cheated their way to an honours degree in physics because defending your final year experimental report (120 typed pages of data, charts, conclusions, explanations, and procedures) required answering live questions from two very smart faculty members.
Why don't people just scan or photocopy a textbook, if the price is too high? Do American students give even higher value for their time than the cost of a textbook?