A $3000 textbook on reinforcement learning

Yesterday I was reading a soft copy (pdf version) of Prof. Dimitri Bertsekas’s book, A Course in Reinforcement Learning, and at some point thought that I may want to get a hard copy of this book. So naturally I went to Amazon and searched for it. Then I could not believe my eyes: the book is priced at \$3000 (\$2999.99 + \$3.99 shipping fee to be exact). And it’s a “Used: Acceptable” book, not even a brand new one!

I put the Amazon link here in case you want to check it out for yourself, and below is the screenshot I took yesterday.

I’m not sure what happened here. The book is not particularly rare, its pdf version is available freely online on Prof. Bertsekas’s MIT website. A similar situation has happened before (see https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/p/358/), although in this case I only see one seller. Nevertheless, I’ll stick to the soft copy for now :).