Don't Judge a Book by Its Copyright Date

You might be familiar with the tradition of requiring a college student to purchase the latest edition of a textbook, even though it hardly differed from the previous edition. Perhaps the change was merely a new cover or an update of a photograph. In effect, the previous edition became a waste and a candidate for the recycling bin.

As homeschoolers or life-long students ourselves, we don’t have to abide by this tradition when selecting our curriculum. In a day when “being green” is a good and easy thing to be, it’s beneficial to both our environment and our pocketbooks to shop for used books, textbooks, and other educational materials. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to open our online store in the first place: to make available the materials that we and other homeschoolers have used in our home schools so that they may be given another turn at being of benefit to others.

When Older Can Be Better

The changes made from one edition to the next have less impact if this older textbook is being used for the first time by a single student. An advantage to this earlier edition is that it will be priced much lower than its original list price, but there may be other instances when finding an older edition is highly desired beyond saving money:

Sometimes a change results in an undesirable difference between the current and previous editions within a series. For example, while we were using a certain literature-based curriculum series in the upper elementary grades, the curriculum was pretty simple: a teacher’s manual and a student’s workbook. The curriculum was excerpt-driven, which meant that you didn’t have to have the full text of the piece of literature for the lessons since the excerpts were what drove the lesson and were included in the workbook. Then, the publisher changed the curriculum to be full-text driven, which required that you have the complete pieces of literature (either borrowed or bought). We sought out the older editions within the series because we went with what had worked for us. This is not to say that the newer edition of this curriculum was worthless, but it wasn’t worth its change in format to us because we had started and had gotten familiar with the original format.

There are times when even a drastic change in format does not mean that the content has changed. This is very true with math textbooks. Math is math. A simple math textbook published a decade ago is just as good as one published recently. In some cases, the older versions are better because they are laid out with less distractions. In this day when social media has influenced textbook publishers to design lessons with short bursts of information drawn in colorful thought bubbles or clouds, your easily-distracted student may find the newer editions impossible to study effectively. If this type of format is included in textbooks for the higher grades, pages filled with colorful boxes and cartoons may actually be perceived by your student as insulting. In cases such as these, older editions may be the better option.

Used curriculum websites such as ours are highly beneficial when you’re designing your curriculum and find that only an older edition will do. After all, let's not judge a book by its copyright date, but by its content.