I want to thank you for this (as I said above) and make some less scholarly observations.

A) I’ve been too lazy to do much lately but that is because we have been organizing a conference. I might point out that that is one nice thing textbook people do – they pay for coffee break goodies, pay for putting up tables on which they can sell their wares, and in general help make such conferences work. Of course, I have doubts that this conference is necessary nor that our students should have to pay for it.

B) Our college is small and low level – so, we teach several classes, have adjunct teachers, etc. That means we want relatively accessible texts & do common course adoption. That makes us a real plum and, having been on textbook committees a few times lately, it also means some good restaurant meals & cute little trinkets. But I think all of us would trade those steak meals for not having to man those committees so often.

C) Because of the nature of our school, we look for the longest dates between publication that a publisher can guarantee. These seem to be getting shorter and shorter.

Part of the reason we do B&C is ease for the teacher, but another reason is that we hope that will keep costs down (more used books, of course, but also more flexibility when they add late, etc. and, we hope, we can leverage a better deal in general costs.) It would seem that there would be less wasted time & effort by the publishers if they kept those old editions. But it is hard not to suspect that the reason we have these committees so often is because the textbook publishers would prefer to have new ones for the sake of new ones. It isn’t like World Lit or pre-Romantic Brit lit or pre-Reconstruction American lit is going to change all that much. (Okay, Edward Taylor was a new find in the last decades, but he could still have been fairly easily accommodated with a new edition every decade or two.) The most trendy ones are full of the most crap – and aren’t very secure in their choices. Those are the ones that are quite different every few years. The handbooks to lit are similar – like iambic pentameter is going to need a different definition every five years?

The most trendy and least rigorous texts are those for rhetoric and comp. They also are the most useless. In the end, they are not always all that helpful at teaching people to write. I was on the committee that chose a classic anthology of really great creative non-fiction. (I posted about it a while ago.) This was exchanged for one that has mainly editorials from newspapers. The writing isn’t terrible, but it certainly isn’t great. Sure, it is easier for our students to read and may be closer to their level to imitate, but it seems to me counterproductive – the students don’t see the best, they aren’t moved as much. I know, your experience in chemistry is different and the liberal arts & sciences are different, but I suspect there are similar pressures at work – and many of them are not to make for better educated students.

Another problem:
This is one with which I’ve had some unfortunate experience in my copy shop and my husband is now on the faculty senate committee which is supposed to come up with some policing: that is the assigning of one’s own textbooks in class, the assigning of one’s notes at a copy shop (and requesting from that copy shop a remuneration). Actually, in my case, a couple of the accounting profs. cut up the tax code, required their students to buy their cut and paste version, and wanted a pretty healthy reimbursement per copy sold. I actually turned down the job after we’d done it a couple of times and I saw what was going on. On the other hand, surely people should not be required to use some other textbook than their own because they would get royalties. (Around here some people provided that the royalties go into scholarships from those sold on this campus; they got the full profit, of course, from those sold on other’s.) I don’t know how you feel about this, but it is a pretty murky area.

Finally, clear off the subject: When I began college, we had two semesters of freshman English in which we read great literature and wrote regular – almost weekly – papers; liberal arts majors then needed to take another two courses. The two flagship research universities in our state have lowered that requirement: a large percentage of those who can get in to these schools place out of freshman English and never have to take an English class. Both of my daughters, with multiple liberal arts degrees never took an English class – and I can assure you that they have become, though through the reading a liberal arts student does, they have become better writers, they weren’t when they placed out of freshman English.

Our students, who want to go to those schools, and are even less prepared do not want to take freshman comp. They still have to do so, but more of them are opting out of the second freshman writing course which is also an introduction to literature. Our school is expanding and the number of sections of lit is declining. And our students go out into the real world and the first thing that employers say is that they don’t read closely and they don’t write well.

This whole thing is going to have to come to a stop some time, but I’m not sure when. English departments resist what they call “service” courses – the big surveys but especially the freshman writing ones. It is true, it is harder to get a book out every couple of years and teach many freshmen sections (not that many do).

Well, I have dragged these comments over to liberal arts and away from the more tightly focused and reasoned work you did on texts. Of course, beyond the lower level courses I teach and at schools without common course adoption, you can find some relatively inexpensive course book selections – some really great lit is in Dover $1.00 editions. Actually, I suspect the books get cheaper the farther up your classes are. In that way we are really different from you guys. (I remember when I still ran my business the costs of some of my worker’s books – for instance, the grad level entomology books. I sure was glad my kids were going into the liberal arts.)