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Comment by edge17 | Hacker News Reader

International Editions differ often in the problems at the ends of the chapters in order to protect US and other western markets. Differences in the problems means it discourages students from buying things that may lead to incorrect answers to assigned problem sets.

As for things just being flat out wrong, I can only imagine this discourages US/western students from buying International Editions to save money.

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I bought an international edition of a text in college because it was priced significantly cheaper. And indeed, it had all the same problems, but they had been re-arranged, so when the professor assigned problems "5-15", I needed to know the mapping from the US 5-15 to the international version's numbers. Which, by quickly thumbing through another student's copy, I could generate pretty rapidly, but boy was that annoying. (I might have reconsidered purchasing the international edition had this been disclosed at the time of sale…)

We had a professor that kept mappings for 2-3 versions behind and basically allowed you to buy the used book on Amazon for about $12 compared to $200 for the new one.

It's these little things that make your professors stand out.

>$200 for a textbook with borderline extorsion sale tactics

That's the moment I fire up libgen

b-ok.cc?

I was not a CS major but I had a number of friends that were CS majors and one of the courses used a book written by the professor, who is also the department head. The book cost like $200-$300. It was a shitty rewrite of the Sun Java documentation with a few added exercises and some reworded bits.

Fucking racket. Also something something cheating and plagiarism is bad unless you're the head of an academic department.

> It's these little things that make your professors stand out

The calculus text at my university was a “custom” edition that came unbound and shrink-wrapped and still cost as much as a regular new text. My calculus IV professor said many times over the first week: “Do not take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson avenue and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends, because that would be illegal. I say again, I cannot advise you take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson Avenue next to Pizza Hut and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends because that is IP theft and illegal.”

Fantastic professor—I really that semester because of him.

> International Editions differ often in the problems at the ends of the chapters in order to protect US and other western markets.

Protect in what way? By not disclosing secret problems based on US-centric data?

I believe edge17 means changing the exercises for the cheaper global edition, so students in western markets are forced to buy the expensive version as they may be assigned these end of chapter problem sets.

Yup, protecting in that the majority of the revenue for the publishers comes from the western markets (US/Europe).

It's the same reason companies like Apple don't sell less expensive phones less affluent markets - if they did the price spread would create an opportunity for arbitrageurs. Google et al however, does create less expensive alternative versions of their products for other markets.

I bought a mechanical engineering book, and I found the rent seeking quite clever: the international version(this one was targeted for the Indian market) did not have American units, only SI.

The rest of the world uses SI units, why would you expect anything else in the international edition?

Because any competent engineer should be able to work with both interchangeably.

If you ask any competent engineer in Australia to work with imperial units, they will go whaaat.

If you ask any competent engineer outside the US to work with imperial units, they will go whaaat.

And almost all of the world uses SI units, so why would you expect anything else in the international edition?

I.e, all you've given us is a reason to only ever use SI. Which isn't really what your intention was, was it?

(I'm aware non SI is useful in some contexts.)

Which contexts?

I used to be a physicist so voodoo around constants so that we end up mass having energy units was common but I cannot think off my head of problems better where imperial units are easier. There are certainly, I am genuinely curious which.

Well, it's easy to remember that the speed of light is roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight...

I thought it was a joke but it is not. And "roughly" here is actually "very close to".

Now I know what imperial units are useful for, thanks.

it's the link with money that I found interesting, $100 for the american units (I mean American book have problems in both system of units, aerospace, military and engineering for science tend to work in metric) and $30 for the SI unit only.

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