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Comment by Steuard | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a professor, I'd be furious if some legislator told me exactly which textbook to use. I'm concerned about book prices, certainly, but mandating a specific text would immediately shut down the few attempts at innovation in textbooks or curriculum that do exist.

If the new books are of comparable quality to the current market leaders in a given discipline (and especially if we eventually get some competition between free texts), then all that will be necessary will be an education campaign to make sure faculty know what's available. We do care about this stuff! (Or at least, a lot of us do.)

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And some care about the kickbacks from forcing students to buy $150 textbooks that cannot be bought used because there's a new "edition" every year that shuffles the practice problems.

That's what needs to be prevented in some way.

Who's getting kickbacks? I've never gotten a kickback. I really want to know if you know of a kickback scam.

The high prices could be due to just the opposite problem: professors are particularly difficult to sell to. They are individually picky about how their subject matter is presented, and textbook meetings (where we try to agree on the textbook among colleagues at a particular school) are frustrating and difficult.

The time and effort expended in selling those books are (probably) enormous. There's no institutional path-to-sale. Decisions are made by the professors themselves, meaning it's close to b2c marketing of a b2b product. The problem, in business terms (stolen from a VC spiel to an entrepreneur group as to why they don't fund educational software) is that "the customer is dysfunctional."

Professors write textbooks and make their students buy them. Thats the scam. I remember vividly the pain during college of buying $150 textbooks that would be worth $30 the next year because a (n+1) edition would be released with a couple new pages just to mess up all the page references and exercises.

That's a very small effect. A professor doesn't make much money off of a single textbook- selling to one class wouldn't be worth the trouble of writing. Even revision (working with the editor) is aggravating. And if you have co-authors? Forget it.

Writing the text book is an act of love and/or vanity. Only if your textbook becomes a "standard" (Halliday/Resnick, etc.) does it provide direct financial rewards.

EDIT: I agree with you about the 3-year cycle, but that's not the authors' doing, it's the publishers'. That's their business model.

> That's a very small effect. A professor doesn't make much money off of a single textbook- selling to one class wouldn't be worth the trouble of writing.

Unless you sell it to a new class (possibly multiple classes) every year.

> Even revision (working with the editor) is aggravating.

That assumes an editing process that isn't streamlined and automated towards the singular goal of making previous editions obsolete and forcing students to always buy the most recent one.

Unless you sell it to a new class (possibly multiple classes) every year.

For what? $1K a year? Would you do it? I wouldn't. The money isn't there.

That assumes an editing process that isn't streamlined and automated towards the singular goal of making previous editions obsolete and forcing students to always buy the most recent one.

That's quite a conspiratorial stretch to think the authors do that. Think for a moment about what it would take to write a textbook that would be acceptable to a group of experts. You would be an expert in a very small part of the field. It would take you immense work and study to make sure you had the facts right on all of the parts for which you are not the world authority. That is really hard work.

The three-year obsolescence plan is a publisher model, not an author model.

If I were a professor who wrote a textbook based on a class I teach, of course I'd make it the textbook I use and make everyone buy a copy. Chances are that the textbook's material closely matches what I actually want to teach in the class. Why wouldn't I want to use my own path through the material? No other textbook is going to match identically or synthesize the material in my way.

I agree. So you would sell, assuming it was an introductory-course textbook for a popular class (best-case scenario), what- a few hundred copies? And that's under the conditions above.

My mechanics teacher wrote our textbook. We had about 10 people in our class. How much money do you think he made? Even if a few other schools adopted it (a VERY difficult task unless you work on your network of friends- which doesn't always go over well in academia), we're talking small money.

He could consult a few hours a year for an aerospace company or something and make a lot more. That's my point.

Why not give the book away to students as part of their tuiton and earn your salary as a university professor?

Because human beings generally have selfish interests. If you tell a person they may own and control a thing for profit, many will choose to do so.

Unsurprisingly, this is a choice made by a large number of professors

> Writing the text book is an act of love and/or vanity. >

You are making the assumption that the author will make a deal with a traditional publisher which will give him/her a 5% to 10% royalty cut. This strategy does not not come out to a lot of money.

I am currently self-publishing a textbook˚ and getting 75% profit margins: $40 sale price - $10 printing cost = $30. My students and friends have been my editors and my proofreaders. LaTeX is my typesetter. If I can sell 1000 copies each term, that would be $60000/year which would pay my rent and allow me two write for a living.

To be honest, though, I must say that love and vanity also factor into the motivation for this project, yet I had always thought of it as a business all this time. Your comment is spot on dhimes, and made me learn something about my true motivations. Thx!

________

[˚] A math and physics textbook for adults. It covers high school math, calculus, mechanics, E&M and linear algebra in just 350 pages. Email if you want to know more.

My friend, unless you are extremely well known or a brilliant self-marketer, you are going to learn something important about the industry. There's a reason that the finances of the industry work out the way they do.

Importantly, if you want widespread adoption, you need to target a course. Yours targets several. I've seen a few hybrid-course experiments where the instructors combine courses that have been traditionally taught separately (like calculus and physics), but they are to my knowledge still rare. I've not seen a course like the one you are writing a textbook for. Who teaches such a course?

> if you want widespread adoption, you need to target a course.

You may be right about that, but I think there is also value in a single book which covers all these subjects in an integrated manner. Especially Calculus and Physics, which are very co-dependent.

Imagine the use case of someone who wants to learn science on their own. Perhaps he/she is taking an online course which has calculus, physics and linear algebra as prerequisites. Traditionally this would mean he/she has to get three different textbooks (400+ pages each) and slog through all that material. There are excellent free books out there on all of these subjects so money will not be an issue, but going through 1200+ pages will be very time consuming.

This is the gap I want to fill: (1) textbook for self-learners, (2) add-on material for a university class, (3) reference book for adults who want to review the material they learned while at uni.

For audiences (1) and (3) having an 5-in-1 product is definitely a good thing. For audience (2) having all the extra material might make my book appear off-topic and decrease interest. In the next iteration, I am going to think about splitting the narrative to make books for individual subjects to cater more to (2).

I wish you well in your endeavor. It's quite an undertaking!

I can remember exactly two professors who had us use their books. One's was out of print, so we got photocopies for free.

Here's an HN discussion about a particularly egregious example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4405296

There are strong indications in this case and mentioned in the discussion that the textbook industry is actively catering to professors who work like that.

It would be nice to see all picky professors just collaborate on the http://www.wikibooks.org/ site, and simply make their own edits on, for example, the The One True Microbiology Textbook.

For students who need dead trees, the Wikibooks platform already supports printing PDF's.

I had a professor assign his own text once (somewhere around 1996?). It was pretty expensive. At the start of the semester, he gave a $2 refund to everyone who had purchased a brand-new copy, since that was his share of the price we paid. I think there were about 60 students taking the class that year, so that comes out to $120.

Are you really suggesting that $120/year creates some vast moral hazard for college faculty? Or even ten times that?

(The "new edition shuffles problem numbers" thing is irritating to me as a professor, too, by the way. It's not clear to me that even most textbook authors are fond of the continual release of new editions, but it seems to be a big part of the publishers' business model these days.)

Take it to the next level selecting textbooks for required classes at a school with 10,000+ freshman / year that's far more tempting. Even just as an ego thing where you assume 'your' book is much better than all the other options.

Speaking as another professor, I quote from SB 1053, section 2, paragraph (c): "Nothing in this section shall be construed to mandate faculty use of any particular textbook or related materials."

Absolutely. I was responding to the parent comment, not to the original article.

But since they are CC you can update/change the "official book" with your changes. You can even sell it yourself. The one thing you cannot do is prevent your edition being copied or improved on.

Mandating books be CC licenced would give great freedom to eductors and protect students.

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