[nooneelse]

About page size... I wondered when the iPad first came out about the screen size vs paper textbooks. I thought it would be too small given my memories of carrying all those big, painfully heavy books around.

But I wanted to check my intuitions against some facts. And I happily remembered that I have an old _An Introductory Course in College Physics_ from 1958 on the shelf. The pages from 1958 measure 5 1/4" by 8 1/4". Much much smaller feeling than the (typical from my college time) Tipler, _Physics_, with pages of 7 1/2" by about 11".

But the diagrams are not worse in any substantial way on the smaller pages. And the text is all quite clear and elaborates things quite well. Only very few of the larger tables, like the one showing the moments of inertia for various shapes, take up the entire, larger page in the younger book.

So I guess my point is, textbooks can work just fine with smaller pages if they are laid out with that in mind. The benefit of focusing the reader's full attention on a few diagrams and explanations at a time might easily outweigh being able to pack more information on a larger page.

[hugh3]

You're right, there's no need for undergraduate textbooks to be nearly as big and as heavy as they are -- they merely got that way in order to justify their enormous pricetags. With a book like Tipler I'm pretty sure the material could be rewritten in a book half the size.

Physics textbooks rapidly get smaller and lighter the more advanced the material gets, though.