Basic text with distracting errors

I used this textbook in an economics course required of engineers at my school. It covered fundamental topics like investment, present worth analysis, and understanding financial statements. There were no fancy graphics, and not many illustrations (although the text of the section headings was blue!). The back of the book includes financial tables that could be useful for reference, and the text itself has some good case studies and examples.

But there's a huge drawback: whatever useful information is in this text is hard to fish out from the very poor writing.

Page 32: ". . . the answer to each question is provided by one of financial statements."

Page 42: "Investment activities include such as purchasing, financing . . ."

I noticed an average of one error per page, although this seemed to get better as I read past the third chapter. (Maybe I just lost the ability to tell!) Now, I haven't noticed any substantive errors, but it's quite possible that one of the frequent mistakes in language caused the meaning of a sentence to change. In addition, the errors are just distracting. Imagine reading along, and not being able to get through a single page without doing a double-take because a sentence doesn't scan. And I'm not even trying to proof-read, just trying to understand the text!

All that being said, this seems to be a thorough treatment of the subject, and I guess I can infer that my professor thinks the content is reliable. But this text reads like a product manual that's been poorly translated from another language.

If this text is required for a course, then you don't have much choice about buying it! But if you have any sense of good writing, I can warn you that this will not be one of those textbooks you keep around after the class is over, so plan on re-selling it. If you want to learn about this subject on your own, I'd be hesitant to trust this book.