For those who have followed the many recent posts in many places (e.g., Joe Liu at Co-Op here, Paul Horwitz at PrawfsBlawg here, Matt Bodie’s forthcoming excellent article here, and madisonian’s own Brett Frischmann here) about the “whither traditional casebooks” meme (including wikibook and wikitreatise accoutrements), there’s a bit more kindling for the fire … in James Surowiecki’s latest column for The New Yorker.
A juicy bit:
Yet even when a professor assigns an expensive textbook, students are remarkably good at gaming the cycle of revisions. For instance, the economists Austan Goolsbee and Judith Chevalier, in a study of more than a thousand colleges, found that the year before a textbook is revised new-book sales drop sharply. That’s because a textbook in its final year is significantly less valuable, since you won’t be able to resell it.
As folks say, read the whole thing!
(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)