Got Medieval has a great post about textbooks and how they do or do not make a difference to the professor.
I didn’t read the article he is responding to, but I still got a lot out of the post.
Your prof has a budget of exactly no dollars to evaluate potential textbooks for your class. He’s completely at the mercy of whatever scraps the publishers will send him, whatever’s in the library, whatever he has left over from his own undergrad days, and whatever he can beg off a colleague who taught the class last term.
Exactly. I just found out I have a different book in my class than I expected. So I wrote the publisher and asked for a copy of the text. I hope I get one soon or I’ll be buying it myself.