On my way down to faculty meeting, I stopped off in the office. There were three packages for me. One I was expecting - a replacement for the big textbook I lost (which I passed on to my chair, who had given me her copy - so let the be-stickering of what is now definitely MY copy begin). The other two were books from Oxford.
One was an ecology textbook. Publishers sometimes send textbooks out to profs to try to attract them to using them. (Yes, it raises the price of textbooks all 'round). Even though I'm fairly happy with what I have now I will look at this - it's paperback and might be less costly, and if it's comparable to what I use now I could switch.
The other one, though - it's "Essential Biostatistics, a Nonmathematical Approach," which is the book I reviewed a year or so ago (and got paid in OUP books of my choice). It was nice of them to send me a copy.
I remarked to the secretary that it was the book I had evaluated pre-publication and she asked me, "Do they thank you in it?" And I checked the Preface, and there was a "Who Helped?" section, listing all of us who reviewed. And I said, yes, there was.
"I want to see!" she said. So I showed her and she seemed impressed.
It's a nice little ego boost. I forget sometimes that the things that seem commonplace to me (I've done my fair share of textbook reviewing down through the years) is impressive to someone who works in a different field from me.
(Honestly, there are people in my field, who, if I bothered to show them, would either kind of shrug a little and give a half-hearted, "that's cool" or else, as is too often the case, enter into micturational combat with a "Yeah? Nice little book. Now, this book I reviewed for *Cambridge,* now that was a monster book and took a lot of work....")
1 comment:
There are a few times when I read parts of a book for someone or did research assistance for a professor, and even though I officially don't care whether they thank me, I'm always really glad when they do.
As for this:
"Publishers sometimes send textbooks out to profs to try to attract them to using them. (Yes, it raises the price of textbooks all 'round)."
Back when I was a grad student, a publisher was visiting the department for some reason, and I just casually mentioned that I was doing my dissertation on Canadian history (actually a comparison of Canada and the US.....the title is very long). I don't think I mentioned that I might ever teach Canadian history (for the very good reason that I had no plans to), but a few days later, I found in my mailbox a free, sample hardback copy of what must've been a very expensive textbook on Canadian political science, courtesy of the publisher. (Even though I was doing Canadian history and not political science, my topic was political science-y, which explains this publisher's choice. That and they probably didn't publish Canadian history textbooks.)
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