A tale of two textbooks: Experiments in genre.
Though the notion of a scientific textbook has been around for almost three centuries, the category has hardly been stable. The plasticity of the textbook genre may be illustrated by recent variations as well as long-term trends. In this brief essay I examine two idiosyncratic but highly successful physics books, each published in the mid 1970s, whose production, marketing, and adoption reveal some of the slippage between such categories as textbook, scholarly monograph, and popular best seller.
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and Department of Physics, E51-179, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. dikaiser@mit.edu
David
D
Kaiser
D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D040541:Marketing; D010825:Physics / Q000193:education* / Q000266:history; D013782:Textbooks as Topic