Croecko Publishing

I would like to thank those teachers who have written asking about the second edition for their patience. As I should by now expect, some unexpected delays have pushed back the publication date to late May. However, I am pleased to say that the finished book of exercises will be 188 pages long and will be available from early June. If you would like to pre-order an inspection copy (or a class set of student copies) I would invite you to send an email to bryce@brycemcbride.com stating:

1. The number of copies you would like

2. The postal address to which you would like them sent, and

3. Your preferred method of payment (either by credit card or by cheque drawn on a Canadian or American bank)

The cost will be $12 per copy plus airmail postage charges via Canada Post. To help you estimate the cost of postage for boxes of books, please go to:

http://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/apps/far/personal/findARate?execution=e1s2

…keeping in mind that each individual book will measure 29 cm long, 22 cm wide and about a cm thick and will weigh around 450 g. As individual copies weigh less than 500 g, if you would like to estimate the postage for an inspection copy, please go to:

http://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/apps/far/personal/farLetter?execution=e2s1

If you plan on coming to Canada or the U.S. during the summer holidays, I would be happy to send books to your North American address to cut down on postage costs.

The teachers’ guide is priced at $20 per copy plus postage. I am restricting the sale of the teachers’ guide to schools ordering class sets of the book as the answers to selected exercises will be included in the student book.

Thanks again for your patience. I will be sure to let you know when the books are delivered  and ready to ship.

I am pleased by the response so far to the Paper 3 exercises and solutions offered last week through the Gumroad website (see post below). I would especially like to thank those schools and teachers who have either encouraged their students to download their own copies or who have written and offered payment in order to make handouts for their classes from their own downloads. I appreciate your respectful response to my own decision to make the resource affordable.

I would also like to share my most recently published article from the March 16th, 2013 edition of the Pembroke Daily Observer, dealing with the efforts of the Mortgage Brokers’ Association to convince the Finance Ministry to reintroduce longer-term mortgages and make other changes in the name of housing affordability.

Keeping the Ponzi Scheme Spinning

…are now available for $3 on the Gumroad website, which can be accessed by clicking on the link below:

HL Paper 3 Quantitative Exercises and Worked Solutions

I used Gumroad as it supported PDF files. Most EPUB formats require a complete reformatting of the source files, during which all the graphs and tables would have been rendered completely unrecognizable. As I wanted to put this up sooner rather than later I opted to release the files in this way for now but may release them on the Amazon and Apple platforms in the near future if I can figure out a way to resolve the formatting issue.

I would ask that you respect the copyright provisions stated at the beginning of the document. I have priced the e-book at $3 in order to make the download both easily affordable and less expensive than making a photocopy.

These 53 pages of questions and worked solutions will be a part of the upcoming 2nd edition of Workbook for the New I.B. Economics that is to be published in April, 2013. I decided to release these questions separately in order to make an additional resource available for students taking their exams in May.

The 2nd edition is now with the graphic designer, and should be printed up by early April. It is a significantly different book, most notably because the printed book will only contain exercises, the lessons to accompany the exercises being freely available online. To learn more about the second edition, please have a look at the relevant page indicated above.

As well, the book will contain over 20 pages of HL Paper 3-style questions. As I have been asked about these questions a number of times in the past couple of months I have decided to release them (with solutions) later this week or early next week as an e-book to help students prepare for their exams in May. When I have successfully loaded the book up onto iTunes I will let you know.

Well, I am back from my trip to Oman and Singapore. I closed down distribution from Oman as while the postal rate there is fantastic, overall I feel it will be better to do everything out of Canada in the future. In Singapore, meanwhile, I was happy to add the Australian International School to the roster of schools using Workbook for the New I.B. Economics and speak with the teachers at Overseas Family School about how to get the most out of the books they are using as a teacher resource.

After a busy fall, though, I am looking forward to some rest and relaxation over the holidays. If you are interested in some reading to help send you to sleep, I invite you to read the following article which appeared in the December 15th, 2012 edition of the Pembroke Daily Observer:

Getting beyond envelopes of cash V2

I am moving my main depot of books from Oman (home of the $5.25 per kg. worldwide printed matter airmail postal rate) to Canada in early December. As such, only until the end of November will I be able to send class sets of books anywhere in the world for the affordable price of $10 per copy, including postage. Thus, if you are thinking of ordering books for next year or for revision purposes this year, I ask you to please get your orders in as soon as possible.

The lesson in the book on the balance of payments dealt with the subject with reference to only the current and capital accounts. However, the revised syllabus requires that the topic be dealt with using the categories specified by the I.M.F., which are the current account, financial account, and capital account. The following lesson should be used instead of the lesson contained in the book to ensure complete syllabus coverage.

IE6 – The Balance of Payments

I would also like to take this opportunity to remind students and teachers using the book to be sure to refer to the “Errors and Corrections” page to amend any other errors or omissions.

I have done some site maintenance today that hopefully some of you will find useful. Specifically, I have refreshed the links for some of the videos on the “Additional Resources” page (while I couldn’t get the new links to embed, they are nonetheless live) and put some international economics material up on the “Additional Exercises” page.

As well, my latest piece from this past weekend’s Pembroke Daily Observer, which talks about how the Ontario government’s proposed public sector pay-freeze legislation violates fundamental property rights, is reproduced here:

The Allure of Shortcuts

I am now truly engaged in revising the book, and have been fortunate to have had some very good conversations with people using the book (notably the E.S.F. folks in Hong Kong) that have led me to decide to change the format for the second edition.

While I will continue to have first edition books available for sale for at least the remainder of this academic year (I still have 1000 or so available for delivery) I will, for the second edition, separate the lessons from the exercises and only print up the exercises and the teachers’ guide/solutions key as actual, honest-to-goodness books. The lessons, meanwhile, will be freely available on this website.

My goal is to have these new, stripped down but greatly improved workbooks and teachers’ guides available for shipping in early 2013 in time for exam revision.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions concerning ways in which you think the book could be improved, though, I would very much appreciate it if you could send me an email.

Thank-you for your support and your patience.

Over the next month I will work on creating an iBook version of Workbook for the New I.B. Economics. I am doing this for a number of reasons, but mostly I am doing it because I perceive that students and schools are increasingly moving away from printed books towards electronic learning resources.

As a consequence of my decision to release an iBook version of the book, I have removed the free PDFs of the book from the website. I would like to reassure schools using the printed text that I would be happy to send the PDFs to them for their students to use while the iBook is being compiled.

As well, I would like to further reassure schools using the book that I remain committed to producing and updating the physical textbook into the future. However, while personally I think that printed books offer students a better learning experience than electronic books, I must also meet the instructional needs of teachers and students with different preferences.

Thank you for your support and for your patience.