So true!

But do they correct the errors from Edition 7?

No. No they do not.

idea for text i |agree| = i absoultely agree :D

So true!

At a class last month, I actually asked (and I may get quoted in an upcoming "New York Teacher"): "Why do math textbooks go out of date?"

History books, sure. But why math books. Yeah, replace the cruddy ones, but why are there new editions?

I had the good fortune of having one or two professors who would accomodate multiple editions of the same text, allowing current students to save money and former students to recover their costs.

All references to the text included both the new and old editions. The benefit to the students outweighed the disadvantages.

personally math and lit should be in book form
history keeps getting reinterpreted requiring more and more books on the same topic
science changes ALL THE TIME quickly making the edition you just bought obsolete
math stays the same and therefore could be kept in its paper form without needing a new edition every damn year

Edition eight more content! More errors!

Worse than requiring a bogus new edition is a publisher cancelling a good textbook only to sell a different text, or the school switching texts completely. Fortunately, the one time this happened in a course I took, the replacement textbook was not bad. It just wasn't as good.

But the crappy book had a better cover...

This always bugged me with American math books... I have some really good Swedish math books that probably were written some time in the 70's on a typewriter with the integral signs drawn in by hand. This was still the literature at my university when I started going there in 2001. Now, everything is to be taught in English using imported books, so now the teachers have to cope with having 3-5 parallel page numberings for differents "Editions"...