posted
Comment: I was wondering if you've heard anything about an urban legend that I heard in grade school. According to the rumor, if you found an error in one of your textbooks, your teacher could tell the publisher and they would send your class free (amd presumably corrected) books. Now that I'm much older and have an idea of how much work goes into making a textbook I know the rumor is at least implausible, since the class that found the problem would probably be close to graduating by the time the new edition got out, but is there any truth to the rumor, or do you know at least how it got started?
Posts: 36029 | From: Admin | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Waaaaaay back when I was in the 6th grade the text book we were using had an error. One enterprising child in the class wrote to them and received $10 for her trouble.
Posts: 32 | From: Dallas, TX | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Well, I work for a textbook publisher, and although it certainly isn't company policy to give free textbooks for such things, it wouldn't be out of the question. Many variables would determine if we were to replace the books or not. If there are errors, they are usually found by the teachers, and we happily will replace teacher copies.
I find errors every now and again, and all I get for it is keeping my job. What a rip!
posted
One of my textbooks was written by the proffessor teaching the course. It is the first additions so they asked us to look for errors. They didn't say anything about free textbooks though, which would be kind of pointless anyway since I 've already paid for the original one.
-------------------- "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
"Doesn't 'Frollo' sound like a delicious hobbit chocolate?"--Amanda F. Posts: 107 | From: Kansas | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
I would find it surprising for a whole grade school class to get free books. Especially since errors in textbooks aren't that uncommon. I started keeping a list of errors in one the textbooks I use, intending to share it with the publisher or author (mainly because I know and like the author), but I got too busy. I found 6 errors without even trying in the first 4 chapters alone. On a 4th edition text.
OTOH, as also mentioned in Towknie's post, publishers do give away books from time to time, so I guess I wouldn't be that surprising.
Maybe I should send those errors in after all... maybe I'll get a free book! Oh wait, I already have a free book, and when the new edition comes out, they'll give me another free book.
Bee
-------------------- People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. -Alice Walker Posts: 335 | From: Minnesota | Registered: May 2006
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posted
I missed that it was grade school textbooks in the OP. I guess I just got too excited when I saw the words "free" and "textbooks" next to each other.
-------------------- "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
"Doesn't 'Frollo' sound like a delicious hobbit chocolate?"--Amanda F. Posts: 107 | From: Kansas | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
I'm guessing something similar happened once at someone's school, then the story was extrapolated from there. In grade-high school here, the books are reused from year to year, so graduation wouldn't really be an issue. It's possible it went down like this:
1) Student/class/teacher finds major, possibly offensive, error in textbook 2) Teacher notifies publisher 3) Publisher says, yeah, someone else alerted us to that error as well. It just so happens we've just reprinted this book to fix that and several other mistakes. Here, have a free copy. 4) Teacher: uh, but we just bought 90 of these books, and they all say "George Washington is a big doodie-head" on page 42. 5) Publisher: Oh, well I suppose you could have a whole new set then.
I still find that rather unlikely, but it's slightly more plausible. Is there a financial incentive for the publisher to immediately reprint the books and send them to those who found the error? More likely it would be noted and corrected for the next print run, again unless it's something really egregious. I work for a music publisher, and I mistakenly put a composer's name on the cover of the music, when it was in fact by Beethoven, but arranged by said composer. We had to have new jackets printed and sent to all our dealers, lest people think the arranger was trying to take credit for Beethoven's work. That was the kind of error that couldn't wait around for the next print run to be fixed.
Incidentally, I once took a college course where the required textbook was written by the professor. He offered a free ice cream sundae to anyone who found errors in the book. One of my classmates did find a mistake, and he followed up on the promise (actually just gave her about $3.00 cash). I found a few errors myself, but not until the semester was over and I was "MST3K-ing" my book.
-birdman
Posts: 1104 | From: near Cleveland, Ohio | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
Birdman makes a good point. If the error is something like:
"George Washington was teh first president."
Meh, it's something we note down, pass along to the editors, and they fix it in the next print run.
If it's something like:
"The state of Texas, being inferior to the state of California in every way, was settled by a bunch of redneck outcasts."
Well, then, we as publishers would have some serious 'splainin to do.
In the middle, a gray area, are subjective things that might get stated as fact because the state government tells us that we must print such things. One such case I found really amusing was in a series of adapted readers, we published "The Red Badge of Courage." We were required to remove all evidence of guns and tobacco from the illustrations, so you see all these pictures of guys in the civil war mysteriously holding a hand up to their mouth or extending their forearms for no reason. A couple teachers called to say something was wrong with our pictures, so we had to explain the reasoning behind it.
I got into a conversation with this guy who was a super-duper libertarian. He was arguing that the textbook industry is evil for publishing false information in its history books. I told him the state tells us what to write, and we follow orders (you are NOT selling a textbook into an elementary, middle, or high school without following the state mandated standards and curriculum).
Fortunately, I only deal with ESL, so the errors that tend to crop up in our books are usually typos that misstate grammatical points.
But let me tell you...Ohhhh, the politics that go into writing a school textbook. There are so many chefs poking around in that stew (state officials, teachers, administrators, editors, production team), that there are almost bound to be errors somewhere in the book.
posted
I wish that were true, in my second year of uni we were assigned a text book written by the lecturer(who then proceeded to lecture from it word for word)which had so many errors it wasn't funnt. They had even managed to get an error on the front cover in the title i believe. That book was the biggest waste of $50 ever.
-------------------- Love is a sudden revelation: a kiss is always a discovery Posts: 902 | From: Australia | Registered: Dec 2005
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quote:Originally posted by ange84: I wish that were true, in my second year of uni we were assigned a text book written by the lecturer(who then proceeded to lecture from it word for word)which had so many errors it wasn't funnt. They had even managed to get an error on the front cover in the title i believe. That book was the biggest waste of $50 ever.
I'm having this problem right now; the Chemistry department at my university thought it would be a great idea to write their own textbook. You wouldn't believe the mistakes they didn't catch! Everyone had to go download a page on the second day and paste it in their books on naming molecular compounds. How do you leave out something that important?
Anyway, at my high school there were several mistakes in the answer guides of the math books, and in the questions, etc. This caused everyone a great deal of grief because sometimes the teacher would do the question on the board with us and then find out that our answer did not match the book's answer and then we'd spend ten minutes trying to figure out where we went wrong. It was a mess. I'm sure he wrote to the school board and to the company (I even called the school board once about how useless the book was) and we never saw any free textbooks...
Posts: 149 | From: Nova Scotia, Canada | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Towknie: Birdman makes a good point. If the error is something like:
"George Washington was teh first president."
Meh, it's something we note down, pass along to the editors, and they fix it in the next print run.
If it's something like:
"The state of Texas, being inferior to the state of California in every way, was settled by a bunch of redneck outcasts."
You can't really argue that that is an error. A textbook writer can write their textbook to be heavily biased while still presenting facts.
I took an economics class two years ago in which it was very apparent that the person writing it hated the south and all of the people who inhabited it, saying things like, "the south has always been in the backseat economically due to poor education and overall ignorance."
That kind of annoyed me considering the class was being taught at a southern university by a professor with a southern accent who seemed to show a lot of pride towards being a southerner.
I also took an AP US History class in high school that used a textbook that really could have had that example about Texas thta you used in it. It was mocked by not just the students but our teacher as well. She decided it was going to be the last year she used that textbook to teach after we spent more time laughing at how subjectively written it was than we did learning from it.
I'm not in the textbook business and I have not seen too many books that were written that poorly, but a writer can write a textbook any way they please, no? I'm sure the politically incorrect ones have their place somewhere, just not in the most traditional of classrooms.
Posts: 146 | From: Columbia, SC | Registered: Jul 2005
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