Facing the high cost of college textbooks, some students are taking matters into their own hands, reports U.S. News & World Report. And they’re getting plenty of help from the growing digital-textbook industry.
Jason Turgeon, a senior at Northeastern University, has become a poster boy for a movement of students who have used e-books, online study guides, and timely help from classmates to avoid buying bulky textbooks altogether. His Web site, Textbook Revolution, helps students find free, college-level material online. By scouring the Web for course resources, Mr. Turgeon says, he managed to pare his own textbook expenditures for one semester to $35. —Brock Read
22 Responses to Costly Textbooks? No, Thanks
bookishone - March 1, 2012 at 8:43 am
A bibliography is also much more useful for the readers of the book.
If you think you don’t have space for a bibliography, think again. Chicago allows the use of shortened citations throughout (not just after the first full citation) if you have a bibliography. Depending on the number of notes in your monograph, you can end up actually saving space by using entirely shortened citations with a bibliography that includes the full form of every source.
andymeg - March 1, 2012 at 10:18 am
When I was in college my housemates and I made up a joke. “What’s this?” we asked as we hopped around on the floor saying “ibid! ibid!” Answer: a frog doing a term paper. Much hilarity ensued. Just thought I’d share.
theatheist - March 1, 2012 at 11:08 am
I do not care if the rules permit such an animal: a scholarly book without a bibliography is practically useless. Likewise, an index.
jffoster - March 1, 2012 at 11:33 am
1 Gid rid of “Bibliographies” of works really or allegedly consulted, and replace them with
2. A List of References Cited.
3. Cite them with scientific and not humanities citing, in the text, as (Chomsky 1965:44), and use footnotes or endnotes only for explanatory or sidebar material.
It’s easier on the writer, the copy editor, and especially for the reader.
Then you don’t need any of that Latin crap.
Nathaniel M. Campbell - March 1, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Yet, scholars must still be trained to use the ibid. / idem / op. cit. / loc. cit. apparatus, as older scholarship (especially German; the French long ago decided they were sufficiently superior to all other scholars that they needn’t bother with most citations at all) is replete with the Latin abbreviations.
But then, there seems a movement afoot to disregard any scholarship from before the 1970′s or in any language not English. So maybe we won’t need to know our way around older books anymore.
theatheist - March 1, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Last time I checked, Literature was a cornerstone of the Humanities, and we use in-text citations (MLA format).
Rana - March 1, 2012 at 1:09 pm
That doesn’t work for history, which often cites multiple works, in multiple formats, at a whack, combined with discussion. A parenthetical citation is useless when you are dealing with ten primary sources (five of them in unusual formats and three of them in languages other than English), two secondary sources, and an explanation of what the original text said before translation into English.
Plus, honestly, I find a small reference number much less distracting to the narrative than a parenthetical citation.
(For all that, I too hate “that Latin crap”; a) it doesn’t work with a note like the above, and b) it’s hell if the author decides partway through the writing process to rearrange some sections and takes the notes with them, as all those abbreviations depend on strict locational relationships to work.)
jffoster - March 1, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Good for you. Maybe it’s influence from Linguistics.
dank48 - March 1, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Learning the Latin terms and abbreviations is a bit like learning Fraktur: you may well need to be able to understand it when you encounter it, but no one should expect you to use it yourself in your own publication.
midevilprof - March 1, 2012 at 2:38 pm
No. In-text citations constitute a hideous distraction that takes away from the prose. And there’s no reason for them not to use Latin abbreviations. They simply don’t as a matter of convention.
Unless the prose of scientists, social scientists, and literary critics is hideous anyway, in which case a further monstrosity can cause no serious harm.
Footnotes, on the other hand, are easy for readers to glance at as they wish, as they move through the paragraph or at the end of each sentence concerned, without clouding up the main text with endless interruptions.
Endotes are a distant second place, because to consult them, readers must flip to the end and then back to the main text. But at least they don’t mar the article itself with jumbles of author names and numerals, as in-text citations do.
Latin abbreviations are confusing, even when readers know what they stand for and what they mean, because it’s just a hassle to track down the original citation to get the information. But, I suppose, if a book or article is read from beginning to end with due diligence paid to citation, as it may have been done in the old days, it would be less an inconvenience. But please, please do not encourage people to use the ugly and no more helpful in-text citation method.
midevilprof - March 1, 2012 at 2:39 pm
You said it, Rana!
nilbogboh - March 1, 2012 at 5:04 pm
I like using latin abbreviations. No justification. I just like them.
Ben Hemmens - March 1, 2012 at 5:32 pm
I’d go further and use a straight number system. Sources are numbered in order of citation, the full references are at the end of the book, end of story. There’s no need to clutter up the text with authors’ names or years.
What also drives me bonkers is a book written not as a series of autonomous articles but as a unit having separate lists of references after chapters or, even worse, after groups of chapters.
jffoster - March 1, 2012 at 6:18 pm
I join your 2nd pgf in by that bonkers driven being.
And I’ve seen what you propose in 1st pgf actually done, somewhere. In fact, I think it was done in a book I contributed a chapter to, but I’d have to check to make sure. It works, although I find the author (and date if more than one by same author) in – text citation a little easier to remember.
Jonathon Owen - March 1, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Where I work, we use only endnotes and repeat the full citation at the first mention in a chapter, with the reasoning that readers do not necessarily read chapters (especially in edited volumes) in order.
But I have to admit that I’d prefer bibliographies or works cited lists rather than just endnotes alone. As an editor, it can be hard to keep track of which citations have already been mentioned and can thus be shortened and what those short forms are. Readers can have similar difficulties flipping back to find the full form.
dottyeyes - March 1, 2012 at 8:25 pm
You weren’t indulging in “loco” weed–I mean “loc. cit.” weed–I presume?
chrislance - March 2, 2012 at 5:11 am
(Slightly off-topic) I have a theory that one of these Latin abbreviations was responsible for the famous crux in the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, My sinful earth these rebel powers that thee arrayI believe that in the author’s manuscript the second like read “Amid these rebel powers…”, but that the printer misread “Amid” as “Ibid.”
mbelvadi - March 2, 2012 at 4:41 pm
Another reason to have a bibliography/list of references all in one place in a book – to make it reasonably possible to include those citations in any compilation of “cited references”. Humanities folks complain bitterly that the world that tracks scholarly citations ignores their preferred publishing medium, the book, and yet are determined to cling to a citation method that makes their inclusion a literally extraordinary labor in comparison with the social and natural sciences.
NCSmith - March 4, 2012 at 2:01 pm
OK. I give up. What is the meaning of the illustration?
NCSmith - March 4, 2012 at 2:02 pm
And now that I have read the title to this piece, I feel like a doofus.
Carry on.
Maureen O'Brien - March 7, 2012 at 8:22 am
If it’s going to become an ebook, you’re going to want it to be more susceptible to searching, not less.
alan_kors - March 7, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Sigh. I’m getting old.