Update: IVDB has a piece on Michelle Sovinsky Goeree, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College, who uses the open source textbook in her intermediate macro economics class. Thanks to all of you who sent this in!
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Today's Los Angeles Times describe the heroic efforts of R. Preston McAfee, author of an introductory open source economics text book, which although "released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market."
I have two questions: Has anyone heard anything about this open source textbook at Claremont Mckenna (my economics books from Claremont are from Mankiw and cost a small fortune) and why does everyone write Claremont McKenna with a hyphen?
On the point of textbook competition, radical free marketeering Wikipedia writer that I am, I must say I approve. I paid $2o.00 for all of my textbooks, but I'm a very atypical student who loves saving money, uses Amazon Prime accounts, and borrows books from the Claremont public library. I know of some students who paid upwards of $1,000 and they were buying used books. Memo to poor students planning on paying for books at Huntley: Don't do it. Just order used on Amazon or buy from your local student.
Apparently, if the textbook monopoly goes the way of the music industry, some Claremont alums and former professors will feel the pinch, but alas, that's creative destructive for you.
- Susan K. Feigenbaum, whose son, David Pepose (a co-worker of mine at New York Sun) says was Claremont McKenna's first female tenured economics professor, is fast at work on a new economics textbook.
- Dan Caton CMC '70 is head of McGraw-Hill Education's K-12 Supplemental and Unique Core Publishing and serves as the Vice President of the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP). Now there's a monopoly I'd like to see broken up!
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2 comments:
Charles,
I used the McAfee econ text in my micro class. The prof also assigned a regular econ text, but made its purchase optional.
Adam
Hello..Susan Feigenbaum, here. For anyone who thinks like an economist, we have here the traditional dilemma of how to create incentives for people to invest intellectual capital to produce new - and in my case, hopefully revolutionary - textbooks,while acknowledging that the MC of dissemination and use is virtually zero. My publisher - Freeman/Worth - is responding by moving to electronic distribution of its books, via DVD, at a substantially reduced price. This is much the same approach that the digital music industry is taking for those users who agree to abide by the private property rights that music creators hold - that is, downloaded music prices are set quite low by distributors to stimulate demand and still reward musical genius. For market economies to work, private property rights must be established and enforced. Otherwise, there will never be innovation - and creative destruction will never come about!
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