Textbooks

[downer]

We used to complain that textbooks were coming out in new editions too often. That seems to be changing. Now the textbooks I'm looking at seem to be dated. One textbook I use has come out in a new edition, but it's largely unchanged and looks out of date. Looking for alternatives, I don't find any good ones. I found a free online textbook from 2002, and then Cengage has one from 2017. And it is still expensive.

I'm getting the impression that the textbook business, once competitive, is slowly grinding to a halt. Maybe it varies according to discipline. But I'm guessing the difficulties of free pdf files becoming available on the internet soon after publication just be a huge problem. And when the textbook comes with a big instructor package, they have to make it compatible with an ever increasing list of LMSs. Must be hard to make a profit in the textbook business these days.