Hacker News Reader

Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

We have the same problem with high school (videregående skole) here in Norway. It should be possible for a child to use their older sibling's textbooks, especially for subjects like mathematics and physics, but very often the school requires a particular edition.

View on HN

At my high school, the textbooks were given to us and then we returned it at the end of the year for the next cohort (we'd right our names on list in the back with the current condition to keep track). I'm not sure if this is how other US high schools did it.

It's the same in the Netherlands. It's a great system I think. Sometimes you can see kids haul all their books on a bicycle, which is quite a challenge even for the Dutch

We each got a book to bring home, and then there was another set of the books kept in the classroom, and a few copies in the library.

That way we didn't have to lug our books back and forth to school and could just use the shared books in the classroom and our own books at home.

It seemed to serve us well and not stunt our growth!

I took Calc 2 at my university and borrowed my roommate's book that he bought the year before. It was useless because it was the "preliminary edition". It was virtually the same book except all the exercises were in customary US units instead of metric. Can you imagine, publishing a math textbook in 1995 in customary units? All of my high school books had been metric and were a decade old. There could only be one reason to do so -- to require the next group of students to buy the new book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com