"W. Watson" wrote in message
ink.net...
Sometimes (back then, and maybe still), one could by tech books from China
that was on almost tissue paper pages. They were quite cheap.

You can find people on Amazon.Com selling books this way. The books
themselves often have stern warnings about how they're only licensed to be
sold in specific countries such as China or India, although personally I have
a hard time feeling too sorry for the publisher if the purchaser really is
someone trying to get an education and not the librarian of a well-funded
company who's stocking the corporate library.

(I could also whine about how most public libraries today seem to have
incredibly poor selections of _contemporary_ technical books, but I suppose
that with their limited budgets purchasing the newest romance novel for $10.99
does generate a lot more checkouts than purchasing the re-print of Grover's
Inductance Calculations...)

It's interesting that educational textbooks in the USA tend to cost pretty
much the same as 'professional' texts (e.g., those from Artech house) or more
(e.g., more of the technical texts from Dover are quite inexpensive) whereas
the software industry figured out a long time ago that it's better to sell
students, e.g., a stripped down $99 version of Office than have them pirate
the $799 professional version. As it is, very few students keep their
textbooks at the end of their classes, which I think is rather unfortunate...
although I would admit that many people who become, e.g., EE's today truly
never expect to crack open Cheng or Sedra & Smith (or even Horowitz & Hill!)
for their entire careers.

In the past decade, I've found some very good, reasonably priced
self-published book or eBooks, such as those on Peter Joseph's site. (In
fact, I still wish I could find out whether or not John Pastonek ever
published anything besides his RF oscillators short course book -- in the back
of the book he claims there either are or would be others, but he seemed to
have dropped off the fact of the earth.)

---Joel Kolstad