I would be super excited about this if I planned on learning anything every again. But I don’t so meh.
“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” [Prof. McAfee] said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”
In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.
“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”
