Books, you might agree, have played a significant role in the intellectual, spiritual and material advancement of humanity. Our usual attitude towards the books is, "if it is in a book it must be correct". But, recently, I have come across some textbooks, in Mathematics, that have printing errors, and in some cases false statements. Errors in the first edition, I agree, are unavoidable, but if printing errors and/or false statements stay around until the fourth edition then there is some cause for concern. Now usually the best thing is to write to the author or to the publisher, but it may not be easy to track the right person to write to.

If you have seen an error of any kind in a textbook, and in the beginning we shall restrict it only to (recently published) Mathematics textbooks, write to me at qcotb@usa.net giving the title, author, publisher and date of publication of the book and of course the page and line numbers where the error occurs. To save my time spent in locating the book, please send me a photo-copy of the offending page/pages at my postal address which is available at the bottom.

On receiving your e-mail I will include the contents under the Current Submission link, and if possible I will send a copy of it to the author. Now it may happen that the author, or someone browsing the web page, has some suitable explanation of what you thought was an error. To save you the embarrassment, your input will appear initially anonymous. When I receive word from the author, or from an expert, saying, " yes, that was an error", I will include your name and address with your message. In this case this message will stay on display until I get a written assurance from the publishers that the error is corrected and sufficiently publicized.

You can use this pre-formatted letter to write to me. Feel free to print and use it.

Just to give you an idea, here is an example. This would also give you an idea of how to send in the errors you caught.

Sometimes, a textbook is written (or gets written) in such a way that it is hard to understand what it is saying. The result is confusion and a lot of students who read from it fail. I came across such a book. You may read my review of this book by clicking at the highlighted part of this sentence. It so happens that this book came recommended for limiting the number of passes in a basic Statistics course. Why should a chairman of a Mathematics Department be looking for such a book? I see good but ugly economic reasons behind this quest for unreadable books. But this is not the place for discussing those reasons. I might write about it if time permits. IF YOU COME ACROSS A COURSE THAT IS BEING USED AS A WEED OUT COURSE DO WRITE TO ME at mzafrullah@usa.net  I will put your letter on display on my web page.