Dear Textbooks

So, we all know you're ridiculously overpriced. There is no reason you should cost the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that you do. You abuse the fact that when students buy you, they have no choice but to pay the exorbitant prices that you charge. This is a huge problem, and the main reason I always avoid buying you if possible, but still not even the reason I'm writing to you today.

If I'm going to be stuck paying hundreds of dollars for you, how about you at least proof-read yourself a bit. It is just ridiculous that despite your crazy price, and the fact that you constantly revise yourself, you still end up with errors. For example, today we were going over a problem in class. The textbook we were using was a fourth edition, so by now there really shouldn't be any stupid errors in it, and I paid $130 for a used copy of it. At prices like that, you better be perfect.

So we're going over this problem, basically it boils down to deciding for some hypothetical company how many TV, magazine, and newspaper ads they should buy to get the most exposure for the least cost. They tell us that each TV ad gets exposure to 1,300 thousand people (and they give us the rest of the information we need, but that's not relevant to my point). We solve it, it has an answer, everything's fine. Then later they add more constraints to make it a more complicated problem. Now they want to make sure they get at least a certain amount of exposure to young children, and young children's parents. Each TV ad will supposedly be seen by 1.2 million young children, and .5 million young-children's parents.

Let's convert this all to plain numbers. As told to us in the first part, 1,300,000 people will see the TV ad. The second part says that 1,200,000 young children and 500,000 young children's parents will see the ad, combine those for a total of 1,700,000. So of the 1,300,000 people that will see the TV ad, 1,700,000 are young children and their parents. How is this possible?

This is not the first time I've seen problems in you stupid textbooks. It would be nice if something that I have to pay way too much for, would at least be correct. I've seen answers in the back to problems be wrong, I've seen problems that make no sense like the one today, I've seen typos and grammatical errors.

I don't think proof-reading is too much to ask.
-SF