Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilc | Hacker News Reader

The worst offenders are the professors who write their own textbooks (even though there are dozens of better ones already available) and then use them in their courses, making money off each student.

I think you are seriously overestimating the financial gains such a professor would make. I've taken several classes with profs who teach from their own textbook; the profit per book sold that a prof receives is usually minimal (either because the book is sold for near cost or because the publisher takes most of the profit). In fact, most such textbooks (essentially just rigorous lecture notes) are downloadable for free anyway.

If you want to make extra money as a professor, writing a textbook and then forcing it on a single class of students is about the least effective money-making scheme I can think of.

View on HN

I had an intro EE class where the professor required students to buy practically unreadable handwritten notes from the university copy center. The price breakdown on the copy center receipt: $1.50 for the copies, $8.50 for royalties to the professor.

Later on I took MITx's prototype 802.11x online course, where I learned far more and managed an A. In that case the professor actually cowrote the textbook, but there was a free online copy for the online class, and the textbook was actually good.

Edit: in another case, another course at the same university used a custom printed textbook sold exclusively by the university for well over $100, that was just a few chapters from one $15 book and the complete contents of another $20 book bound together.

100 students x $8.50 is only $850/semester. Even if the class was 500 students, that's still not an overwhelming amount of money for writing a book. If you're teaching classes that large, you're probably making more money on the lecture circuit and become advisors/consultants at companies.

You would be surprised how low some professors will stoop. My sophomore engineering graphics class required payment of $35 in royalties and $5 in copy fees (going by the standard rate of .10 a page) just to get a printed copy of the PDF course packet (required to pass the course). It wasn't bound or anything, we literally had to go to the privately owned copy center and fork over $40 and then wait while they printed it off and then handed us a stack of paper.

I know that there were ulterior motives on the professor's part because I specifically asked to just print it out myself and was told that the TAs had been specifically banned from allowing students access to the PDF version for printing.

This was a 300 person lecture taught twice per year.

300$352 is $21,000. Suddenly that looks pretty appealing to the professor who thinks he could use a new bass boat this year.

Was any of the content copyrighted and therefore the cost was to pay for licensing that content? That was a common cause for the somewhat high prices for our course readers in college.

So the students should pay that cost? That is absurd. The school should either pay the teacher more or lose them. The financial burden of keeping the professor there should not be placed on the students outside of their tuition.

This wasn't a book; it was a bunch of photocopied handwritten notes, maybe 100 pages at most, that appeared not to have been updated in years.

In the late 90's I took an intro psyc course and the prof wrote his own online textbook, mass 300 student lecture and we all had to "subscribe" to his book for $40 each, he taught 3 sections a semester. He had $72k a year on sales, because you couldn't pass the course without the "book". It was one the most god awful eye bleeding design I've ever seen. But, yes you CAN make decent money off selling your own textbook to students on the 101 level.

I agree. I once had a to buy a professor's book. It was $240.00 of confusing sentence structure, no diagrams(other than manafacture's publicity material, written terribly). He actually made a slightly complex topic seem like we were finding the "God Particle".

As to his profit, I'm not sure how much he made off of each book, but the book is used across the world. The only reason I think any instructor would use his book is because it's a niche subject matter; the mechanics and theory of hydronic heating systems.

If Dr. Hydronics ever reads this--you're probally a nice guy, but you made a relatively simple subject complex. Funnel your sentences. Use numbers. Don't use unnessary words. KIS(keep it simple).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com