although i'm a book lover and still have all of the books that i ever bought for my classes, i don't think that requiring students to buy books makes much sense these days... probably the only exception would be for large, introductory lecture courses in history/theory/structures/m&m where the lectures might closely follow a book... for most other courses i think that it is best just to provide scanned PDFs of all of the readings either uploaded to a course folder on the server or on a course website (like blackboard)... this allows students the option of printing them all out or reading on screen... personally, i've never been all that comfortable reading on screen, so i always end up printing everything and essentially creating my own course reader... this is actually one thing that i think the iPad might change since there apparently is a PDF reader app that allows you to easily highlight and comment on PDFs...

i make a course reader rather than give a list of books to buy. it gives me more flexibility, and provides students with a number of different styles of writing (writing style is a big barrier for some, I've found)

it often takes a while getting the pdfs together, but once you have them, you can reuse them. like philip, i make them available online.

this doesn't work so well for visually-intensive books or very long texts, where the students would end up printing out hundreds of pages.

i also try to recommend things for students to read as i go. I don't know how many follow up on this, though.

(you can highlight and comment on pdfs in Acrobat Reader or Preview or pretty much any pdf reader, btw)

Seriously? JSTOR... for life!

I prefer digital/OCR'd eBooks and articles. The preference I have is, while textbooks can be cited, that college should be prepare you for writing practical articles and papers. It seems once you break the first two or three years of undergrad and start moving into graduate education, everything is all journal entries and secondary references (newspapers et cetera).

I'd imagine for the most part that this applies to architecture as well as it does in urban planning/urban design/economics.

[objectionable]Part of reading a book is too absorb all of the information in that book whether the information is practical or worthwhile to subjects the course is exploring.

That familiarity allows you to recall where in the book and which sections would contain that information if you were referencing it at a later point (i.e., writing papers, synthesis, all that jazz.

While it is good to read books from cover to cover to gain valuable knowledge, it is much easier to just search them with the digital technology we have available. But even with keywords, one still has to read the article found in order to see if the use of the search term is appropriate with the paper.

In this sense, it makes more sense to use 'survey' type books that explore topics and wet someone's appetite in that subject. Once some is engaged by an idea and a topic, it makes searching for information relevant to that topic via JSTOR or Google Scholar.

To an extent, textbooks are fundamentally dead if one is looking for more precise, specialized or peer-reviewed information.[/objectionable]

I think an interesting take on the course would be to supply a list of boolean or other search strings to use in JSTOR's or Google Scholar's databases so they can explore course topics that interest them.

Heck... you could even turn it into a weekly assignment where they have to find at least one article a week on the subject list, write an executive summary and give you the summary/printed article.

Think of it as free research building-- you could then compile a book because most of your referencing is half done!

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