Comments on: Professor gives Cisco manual away for free

Rebuffed by networking giant, instructor Matt Basham goes to the Net and offers his book at no cost.

Hooray for Basham!

The cost of textbooks is completely out of line. Three cheers for Basham, who is more concerned with the students' learning than with charging them for another book.

[Myron.S]

What's the URL to the book?

Erm, good article. What's the URL to the book?

What book?

What book? Search Lulu for Cisco or the authors name and you get nothing.

[truegenius]

Cisco "notices" Basham now? Sounds like they feared losing $$$...

Basham's story proves once again that if something costs a corporation a large enough amount of money, they'll pay attention. They smugly took a pass on his book, which sounds excellent, and he believed in it enough to say, "I'm still going ahead with this." The $100 per book that Cisco lost, I'm sure, made them say, "Whoa! Are we overlooking something here?" Another situation where big-corporation complacency is beaten by individual ingenuity. Go Basham!

[John Kuzak]

$100 per book

http://www.analogstereo.com/lexus_gx_owners_manual.htm

Here's the link to the book...

http://www.lulu.com/learningbydoing

[aurizon]

Professors in cahoots with text publishers

At most colleges, bootleg photocopies of text books, as well as copies of the CD commonly enclosed are very common place. So much so that many professors now insist on seeing a purchase receipt for the course texts. A lot of this was caused by the college bookstores finding themselves stuck with excess unsold copies.
The book store dialogs with the profs and orders as many nooks as there are students, expecting to sell them all. When students make duplicates the book store eats the unsold, as they often change year by year and cannot be returned(above a certain limit)
Asian students lead in this. As there are shops ful of all manner of copied texts in HK, and Taiwan and I daresay China too.