Earth needs editors

College textbooks: As crappy as they are expensive

If you haven’t been to college in a while, you might be surprised to learn that the average new textbook costs more than $100, meaning the average student spends almost $900 a year on books.

What do you get for your money? Inevitably, you get a CD-ROM and access to some online repository of worthless video clips. You’re also likely to get a new annual revision, hastily cobbled together from last year’s book, full of sloppy errors and disagreements between the text and the index.

Sadly, I’ve come to expect shoddy editing in my slick $110 textbooks, but every now and then, I see the kind of error that every single person involved in the book’s production should have noticed. Today’s example comes from Shirley Biagi’s Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media, Seventh Edition. It’s published by Thomson/Wadsworth, a leader in the field of costly, crappy textbooks.

Duh.