Universe textbook

[darthvader]

I'm looking to purchase this book but am a bit puzzled about the pricing on amazon of the 10th edition - does anyone have this book or purchased the 10th edition from Amazon (or elsewhere) recently?

It's called "Universe" by Roger Freedman, Robert Geller and William Kaufmann

the book appears twice on amazon uk but with 2 different prices £52.99 and £98.51 ??

I'm guessing the cheaper version doesn't include the CD-ROM but it doesn't say anywhere in either description - can anyone clarify ? I assume both versions are of the 10th edition paperback. (I thought the more expensive might be hardback but it says paperback)

thanks - links to both versions below...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roger-Freedman-Universe-10th/dp/B00I61QA22/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410123780&sr=1-3&keywords=universe+10th+edition

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Roger-Freedman/dp/1464124922/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1JQQ24AXM0XNS4Z7GFAZ

[jamespels]

The difference is the seller. The £52 version is sold direct by Amazon; the other version is sold by several stores who also sell on Amazon (click on the "buying options" button to see a list.

Seeing price differences like this, I can start to see the challenge facing bookstores when Amazon can undercut then do massively...

[darthvader]

That did cross my mind but the difference was so huge I thought I was missing something

[Floater]

These big sites - no names, no pack drill - are notorious for huge price differences.

Last week I bought a battery for which I paid £18.95. It was also on offer, on the same site, for prices ranging all the way up to £235!! Exactly the same specs; no difference in delivery time; the same product.

Go figure, as our American cousins might say.

[davkt]

A word of warning about the 10th edition, there are some rather problamatic proof reading errors, in many places throughout the book (but not all) where a number should have a - sign in front of it it has a 2 instead and + signs are replaced by 1. To give some specific cases on page 113 absolute zero is listed as 2273 degrees centigrade (should be -273) and on page 473 the absolute magnitude of the sun is given as 14.8 instead of 4.8 (so 10000 times dimmer than it actually is). To make matters worse a little earlier on  page 473 the magnitude of Sirius is correctly given as -1.43 so while the problem is present in at least 2 chapters (all I've read so far) it isn't consistent.

[tbird]

The 9th edition includes Starry Night planetarium software not sure 10th edition does.

Can't believe the price of these now !

[davkt]

My 10th didn't include Starry Night (not worried as I'm a beta tester so have the latest version anyway), the other thing about the 10th is the paper quality is pretty poor (think cheap magazine rather than expensive text book)

[darthvader]

My copy didnt include it either

They are pretty bad errors for a book like this and for this price

Has anyone been in touch with the publishers about it? Maybe we can get them to publish an errata prompto?

[davkt]

I've emailed the publishers but they say they will only take comments from university profs so I've got the UCLan guys to get in touch. I also dropped an email to the lead author Rodger Freedman asking if he knew what a mess the publishers had made of his book.

[darthvader]

You beat me to it I was going to contact Freedman by email too

I'd be interested to know if anyone comes across any other errors - im only on chapter 2 and they may not be so obvious to amateurs like me!

[davkt]

Yep, my main concern is I now don't trust any numbers in the whole book that start with a 1 or a 2 I'm not familar with already which is a total pain! I guess it won't hurt if more than one of us emails the author so he gets how much of a problem this is, and I guess a lot of readers won't know enough to spot the errors that are obvious to me. I guess by the time we are all done on the UCLan Cert in Astronomy we may have a pretty thorough errata for the bits of the book the course uses, there are 90some of us on the course and quite a lot of us have under or post grad qualifications in other areas of science so between us I think we will spot most of them!

Did you spot the typo on P11 where it says  that 0.00245 is 2.45 x 10 ^ -4 instead of -3?

Oh and I see you are pretty much next door to me as I live in Wirksworth.

[darthvader]

Fortunately, I'm not studying any formal course, just muddling through the book for my own interest.

Mind you, it's hard enough to take in without the added problem of print errors.

I did notice that about the power of 10 misprint, I virtually convinced myself I had made the mistake!

Yep just down the road (5 miles outside Ashbourne) - we do pop into Wirksworth now and again, visited the star circle in the summer. I actually used to play footie for the Wheatsheaf pub in Wirksworth in my younger days!

[Geordie mc]

I used the ninth edition when I did the course. It is rather poor quality paper too. However, my biggest issue was that the book and the uclan course notes sometimes differed in the way they presented equations and in terminology for the same thing. Be careful! Also found the Facebook group invaluable so hope there's one for this years students. Uclan support was rather slow and often rather poor. Fellow students were much more help.

[davkt]

Yep, it does seem to be mostly students (well those of us with under or post grad science quals in other subjects) answering the questions of the other students with the staff appearing every few days to maybe answer one or two. I must say even a week into the course I'm a bit worried a fair few students seem to think being able to add a couple of numbers together on a calculator is enough maths to study astronomy.

On the paper my old 7th edition is much better, sort of nice mainstream magazine weight, I guess cuts are being made in both the physical and human resourse devoted to the book though while no best seller list title I can't imange sales are that small compared to most text books.

[Geordie mc]

I agree on the maths point. Uclan say not a maths based course but it is very maths heavy. If you haven't done A level or beyond or it's been a while you probably need to brush up on your maths skills. It is astro-physics after all.