More on college textbooks

Anyone who goes to college or pays for someone who goes to college knows that the tuition is just the cover charge, just the amount that lets you get in the door to start the real payments. Fees, of course, are the major breath-taker, five or more times the tuition figure.
And then come the textbooks. In one class a couple of years ago, I paid $185 for one book. Typical charges are around $100 per book. They're like bridesmaid dresses, expensive items good for just that one occasion. Good study habits would have a student mark up a book with underlines and marginalia. If you hope to resell your book, though, you have a strong incentive to keep your highlighter holstered.
Textbook quality trades in a narrow range, from C+ up to a high B or very low A-. The publishingook  process has a fundamental contradictory set of goals - provide the most timely information, but don't revise the book too often. (The publishers aren't being charitable. It's expensive to order a new printing, even if they get to charge fresh prices.)
A good textbook will lead you through the material in way that fosters good retention. You'll get the key concepts as you need them, often as sidebar definitions. There will be example to illustrate complex points, study guides to help you review, and a good index to help you locate information quickly.

Even among good textbooks, there can be failings. For example, in my current real estate law text (Daniel F. Hinkel. Practical Real Estate Law. Delmar Pub, 2010.), there are 13 pages(!) of a mortgage amortization schedule. What's worse, one of the columns shows the per diem rate (the amount that would be charged per day if the loan was paid off before the end of a billing cycle) is .0000 for each line for all 13 pages. (The term per diem, it should be noted, doesn't appear in the glossary or index.)
Granted, 13 pages of stuff that's useless because it only shows the amount for one mortgage price at one interest rate for one term isn't a big deal in a 700+ page book. It does, though, make you wonder how much other filler material could be jettisoned in an effort to save the student a few bucks.
And, oh, by the way, there's a small section on subprime loans, the kind that have been in the news so much. Well, because laws and practices are changing so fast, here's what the book has to offer:

More information concerning subprime lending can be found on the Internet using a keyword search on a search engine such as http://www.google.com.

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It might have been better to use Let Me Google That for You: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=subprime+lending