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.
That's what needs to be prevented in some way.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unsurprisingly, this is a choice made by a large number of professors
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.
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?
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).
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.
For students who need dead trees, the Wikibooks platform already supports printing PDF's.