Textbooks have been a simple commodity of publishing for a long time.
Teachers have been the unpaid middleman of the deal: adopt a book; it works;
three years later a new edition appears; adopt it; students buy it. Publishers
make money. Await the next edition.
Consider this possibility: an old book is still in print--maybe it was a
"textbook" by design, maybe it was a textbook because many of us
required it as a text for a class. An unchanged edition is still in print. It is
now 20 years old. The author is dead. The book is a classic, but dated. Lots
happens in 20 years.
At some point, many of us feel obliged to abandon the old book because even
in things like history of art, new things happen/are discovered/become
important. A few years ago you'd have to change titles to help your students be
current.
The Internet permits you to give old books a new lease on life. Adopt the
classic. Admit it's outdated. Make part of the class assignment bringing the
material of the old book up to date with something such as a wiki or papers
circulated to your students only (as in Blackboard or another login-controlled
LMS). The old book ignored non-western; have
students update current views. The old book was male-biased. Have students add
women artists. The old book is so old that it has no information on the art
scene of the last twenty years. Have students add the last twenty years.
The old textbook that was a classic remains a classic and the updating is a
learning task rather than an economic windfall for publishers.
