Modern textbooks are over designed
When did textbooks start being replaced by particolored monstrosities? I can imagine textbook marketers get excited over the additional appendices, and in-chapter supplements, and case studies showing ‘real world applications’, and highlight boxes, and end of chapter bulleted lists of important points, and outline boxes for each definition, and several figures per page, and that on top of it all each separate feature has its own color for quick identification… but I can’t imagine that readers are nearly as enamored of that clutter.
Remember the good old days when books used one color of ink– black–, and one font family, and because they cost so much, figures didn’t make the cut unless they were actually worth 1000 words? When textbooks didn’t need user manuals? I wasn’t around then, but I learned calculus from a book written in those times, and it outshines any modern calculus textbook I’ve seen with all their educational accoutrements. Likewise Feller far outshines any more modern probability text I’ve come across. Paradoxically, having to work within relatively spartan printing resources helped those authors to focus more on the content of the material than the presentation. It also seems that they were less worried with soft-selling their material: those texts have more gravitas than modern pulpy textbooks.
I wish we could return to those times. Or failing that, I wish I could locate an introductory macroeconomics text that doesn’t induce a migraine after reading several pages.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Another visit to the library… (6/13/2002)
- What is Dell doing? (7/15/2007)
- My summer plans (5/15/2004)
Where I stay you get the low-priced editions for developing countries which are in greyscale. No migraines! But there seems to be a general dumbing down of US undergraduate texts–thankfully the graduate texts are still untouched by that.
Speaking of introductory microeconomics, I strongly recommend Blanchard’s macroeconomics. It also sins on layout, but much better than its competitors in terms of content.
Comment by AnonEcon — 8/27/2008 @ 12:03 am
oops, macroeconomics, not microeconomics
Comment by AnonEcon — 8/27/2008 @ 12:05 am
Yep. The microeconomics selection was sufficient– I found two promising candidates at our library–, but overall there seemed to be about half as many macroeconomics books, and none that I found interesting.
I suspect that Caltech is lacking in economics books compared to other schools: there were probably under 20 introductory economics books to select from, and the book someone on livejournal’s economics community recommended wasn’t there, even though I suppose it’s one of the big names in the area.
Comment by Alex — 8/27/2008 @ 11:11 am
Blanchard’s book is macro, my mistake was saying that it is micro.
Comment by AnonEcon — 8/27/2008 @ 4:18 pm
It is not possible to have too many diagrams in a mathematics textbook. That said, color is something which is often better left out than in.
Comment by ObsessiveMathsFreak — 9/5/2008 @ 10:08 am