Dear Colleagues,

As we wrap up work on the fourth edition of Intermediate Accounting, we’d like to thank each of you who adopted the third edition and the updated third edition. Thanks to users like you, sales of our third edition doubled over the previous edition, and our McGraw-Hill colleagues recognized our success by voting our book Revision of the Year for the second time running. More than awards or sales figures however, it’s the positive responses from so many of our fellow faculty that truly brand Intermediate Accounting a success. As intermediate accounting instructors ourselves, we know how crucial it is to choose the right textbook for your course and for your students. That’s why, when we began work on the fourth edition, we wanted your input every step of the way.

Our partners at McGraw-Hill tell us they’ve rarely seen the kind of extraordinary feedback we received in preparing the fourth edition. More than 160 of you took the time to provide us with feedback on the book. Your suggestions were extremely valuable, but what struck us most was the tremendous enthusiasm of even the most critical review. Everyone, it seems, found something to like in Intermediate Accounting, as you’ll see for yourself as you read this introductory preface. That enthusiasm doesn’t stop with faculty; we received letters from students who, when their current books proved inadequate, bought Intermediate Accounting completely on their own initiative.

Our goal was to create the kind of textbook you would have written for yourself to use, and we continue our commitment to provide you and your students with the most readable, accurate, and up-to-date intermediate text available. We also pledge to continue to write the major ancillary materials that accompany the text ourselves, including the website materials. Last, we will continue to listen to you, our colleagues, in developing our text to help provide your students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies to meet the challenges of our evolving accounting profession.

Sincerely,

J. David Spiceland
James F. Sepe
Lawrence A. Tomassini