Wheelock’s Latin holds the line on high textbook prices

USA: The new edi­tion of Wheelock’s Latin is out. I had four years of Latin in high school, and thought it really helped my vocab­u­lary and gram­mar. So here’s my plug: take Latin.

Whee­lock died years ago, but the Whee­lock fam­ily has pressed Harper­Collins to keep the text­book price at a rea­son­able level. The paper­back edi­tion costs $21 new. But, as Al Greco says, the publisher’s busi­ness model is bro­ken. Used books and the down­load­ing of scanned copies help stu­dents avoid buy­ing a new copy of every textbook.

I’m about to go through the usual beginning-of-the-term ques­tions from stu­dents who want to use an older versino of the course text­book. Both of the text­books that I use now have sig­nif­i­cant changes in their new edi­tions, so I tell stu­dents to get the cur­rent edi­tion. A few try to get by with an older edi­tion, which may lack updated read­ings or entire chap­ters. Some­times it hurts their performance.

Tagged as: book, business, faculty, revenue, student, textbook, university, USA