Textbook manifesto (2016)
Textbooks are flat out unnecessary. The notes on the board should be enough to understand the material, and the teacher can either write their own problem sets or copy them from somewhere and put them online. There&#x27;s just no excuse to require a textbook for a class - it means the teacher is unable to communicate the material effectively and needs the students to read it on their own, can&#x27;t be bothered to write or copy homework sets, or is forcing students to buy the professor&#x27;s own book out of greed, none of which should be seen as acceptable. If the department makes you have one, just don&#x27;t use it (happened in a few of my classes). For classes that need some out of class readings like history or English, there&#x27;s no excuse to make students buy books when the body of freely available, uncopyrighted work out there on the internet is so easy to access. Good example: a history class I had a few semesters ago where the primary documents were a simple downloadable .doc.<p>I&#x27;ve had lots of classes that worked like this, particularly my Calculus I&#x2F;II classes where there was a textbook but homework from it was just suggested, not collected, and the lectures were entirely sufficient to understand the material and do well on the exams.<p>Beyond being a pointless scam, I&#x27;d go as far as to say textbooks make professors worse than they would be otherwise by letting professors use them as a crutch.