Textbooks Prices: Out of Control
cliffmass.blogspot.com
cliffmass.blogspot.com
Those same professors dictate which books students buy. Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. At many large American universities a board of professors pick the books for the large Chemistry, Biology, Physics classes. If one of the board members has written or contributed to a book, you know that is the book that will be assigned to 1000+ students a semester. At near $200 a piece and assuming a 30% royalty that professor just made himself $60,000 at ONE university. Now imagine his book being used at 10+ universities.
No matter how great the open textbook world gets, professors who have the option to net $60K are not going to select those books which gain them nothing. Once again, students are not the consumer of the textbook industry.
One aside on new editions. I have a 2nd edition of a book, the 7th edition, and the 12th edition. The only thing that changes is the problems at the end of the chapters. The text on each page is near identical. The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.
Also, as a pleasant surprise, the slides he used in class (and where available for students to download) were almost exactly the same content of the book.
Edit: Now that I look more closely at it that CS book was just a supplement to the actual textbook, which was written by the instructor.
http://lukethomas.com/the-textbook-industry-greed-its-gettin...
At least in mathematics (excluding the cash cow known as calculus), professors really do care that their students don't have to pay ridiculous costs for texts.
Sure a lot do, like the professor in the article, but that doesn't mean they all do. There are some that don't care and I'm sure others who haven't thought about it or rationalize the situation because it benefits them immensely.
That is to say making generalizations like that boils down the issue to "Professors care" vs "Professors take advantage of students" neither is absolutely true for the system as a whole.
But perhaps the mathematicians are on the far end of the spectrum, since their ideal work environment requires nothing but a writing utensil and a writing surface.
This is definitely true in the vast majority of cases. They take advantage of the fact that there are subjects like molecular biology that change significantly from year to year, even at the undergraduate level.
Undergrad topics are not only stable but almost completely isolated from change. A bleeding edge discovery in physics is only relevant to a Ph.D. It doesn't, for instance, upend classical mechanics on an undergrad level. That small change will never (for the most part) ripple its way all the way back to classical mechanics in a way that warrants a new book.
So what changes from edition to edition? The ordering of the chapters, and the questions they contain. It is fundamentally bullshit.
When I took my first year civics course, I mistakenly purchased the previous edition. Upon realizing that the table of contents in my book didn't match the course syllabus, I sent a quick email to the professor explaining my mistake, the fact that money prevents me from getting the correct edition, and whether or not I could get by with the old one. Sure enough, the (awesome) professor explained that the only things that were different were the order of the chapters and their respective titles (she even gave me a mapping of old title to new). As a further point of cool-professor-ness, she acknowledged the bullshit of the new edition, and explained that the book choice was out of her hands.
That was the last time I bought a current edition (sans a few classes which had custom books). Every semester begins with an email to the professor asking if the previous edition could be used, and almost without fail the answer is yes.
And the people who make the books caught on. If students know nothing changes from edition to edition, there's no incentive to purchase the new edition. So, what the current model for text books? Required Online Access codes. New editions come with the book, PLUS the online portion where you can actually submit your answer to the book's questions. Lucky us. Did you pick up a previous version of the book? No problem, just purchase this $70 access code so that you can submit your homework.
It's bullshit all the way down.
Exactly. Besides the conflicts of interest you mentioned, the actual contents of the texts are crafted for the benefit of the customers (the professors of course). Directly from the article:
>To get faculty hooked, Ahrens offers all kinds of extras for the instructor, like test questions, visuals, and homework questions. Not much use for the student's though.
And this leads to a situation where you, the student, are simply paying for the professor's laziness, as you put it:
>The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.
Those publishers sure know what they are doing...
I'd like to know where to get that kind of deal! I have only one experience publishing a textbook (currently in progress, with Springer), but we get 6% total, split between the authors (so 2% of the cover price each). That seems to be a fairly common rate at least for niche stuff. I guess if you're writing a "blockbuster" textbook and are a Famous Name you can probably negotiate something better.
In our case we're also putting the book free online. The main issue in getting that through wasn't our own worry about losing royalties, but difficulty convincing the publisher, who I think are in turn worried more about precedent and the way the market is shifting than this one book. If it were up to us, the whole thing would be open-access, and also the cover price for a print copy would be considerably lower than whatever they're likely to price it at. In the end we did a sort of "take it or leave it" ultimatum where we put a draft manuscript online to teach last fall's version of the course, before we'd signed a deal, and told the rep that we would only sign a deal if we could leave an author-formatted manuscript version online, which the publisher (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to. It helped that the rep is part of our research community and we have a good working relationship to explain what our goals are.
In our case the competing incentives are: 1) institutionally it doesn't "count" as a published book unless it's with a recognized publisher, and having it with a recognized publisher also makes it easier to get it into libraries and get other researchers and teachers to take it seriously; but 2) we want people to actually read it, and a €100 Springer book massively cuts down on potential audience, especially non-academic audiences, who we think the subject matter might appeal to if it weren't for the price. Hence the arrangement where Springer publishes it but you can also get the penultimate "author's manuscript" PDF (which will be identical except for formatting) for free online seems ideal for us [1]. We will also not be requiring our students to buy the paper version; the PDF version will be fine for the course.
[1] Well ideal from the perspective that both audiences are served: non-academics, autodidacts, hobbyists, and students who want a free-or-cheap book can get a free book through the PDF channel; academics, administrators, library acquisitions people, and methodologically conservative educators can get a Traditionally Published book through the publisher channel. This is probably not an ideal arrangement from the point of view of royalties, though: if we just self-published for €20 and put some effort into advertising, we would probably sell many more paper copies, and get more money (and also get to keep all the money, not 6% of it). But ultimately writing this book is not our day job or expected to be a significant source of income, so getting it into The System of libraries and official approval was worth the tradeoff of (probably) not making any money from it.
I get in the first class, lab manual in front of me. The teacher comes in and... wait... Is that... That's their name... on my manual. Ugh, I see how it is, whatever. "Don't forget your manuals by the first class - they are MANDATORY".
Then comes our first lab - the first thing she tells us? "Oh, your manual is old, so a lot of those directions aren't right. I'll tell you what's changed when need be (every class)."
If you're going to charge us $50 for a shitty lab manual, can you please make sure it at least keeps itself together and has the right freaking instructions!
I also haven't had any choice in what version of the book I use. I've had the bookstore call me and tell me that there is a new edition and they won't order the old edition so i have to use the new edition or some other book entirely.
Eh? How does a single phone call from a single bookshop prevent you from assigning a particular edition of a particular book for your students?
Are you in a remote location in a country without an Amazon or Abebooks equivalent?
This is not meant as snark. I honestly don't get it, and would like to understand the background to the situation you describe.
They would buy them from one of the 400 students who studied the same course over the previous 2 years.
In the current universe, older students are stuck with textbooks they no longer need, whilst younger students are worried about buying these same textbooks lest they miss out on some required content.
I bought a used copy of 'Intermediate Microeconomics (2nd edition)' from an older student when I arrived at university, for less than half the price of the newer 3rd edition, which had been published that year. The book was much cheaper then, so I saved only a few pounds, but the current 8th edition costs over 150USD.
I'm not sure how the content of a first or second course in microeconomics has changed over the last 20 years, but a used copy of the 3rd edition can now be had for less than 10USD.
Regardless, in the courses I've taught that use textbooks I've always encouraged students to use older editions if I know that they are substantially similar to the latest edition.
At least part of the issue lies in the reward system. Lesson One of economics is that people do what they are rewarded for doing and at this point most faculty would not get professional credit for being part of an open text development effort (obviously the situation now with printed texts is that people get money, and obviously also people do things for a variety of reasons but generally ..). Since a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts, you can't be surprised that quality open texts are not thick on the ground. (I'm fortunate in that my institution has been willing to recognize my work in this, but such generosity and foresight is not common.)
So it is not as simple, at least in math, as making an edict.
I totally agree that a meaningful text can't be created a la carte by mixing disparate sections written in different styles, and covering concepts differently. The value provided by the author is not just writing the words but choosing the order or presentation, carefully foreshadowing concepts in earlier chapters which will be presented in later chapters, and using spaced repetition in later chapters to review and solidify core ideas from the beginning.
That being said, I think texts can be pretty modular if written with modularity in mind by the same (or a few) authors. For example, I was able to reuse the "intro to high school math" sections from my first book on math and physics in the followup book on linear algebra.
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(which is certainly the logical way to approach this, but I think makes the important implication that it may in fact be motivating students away from certain otherwise valuable courses)
If I was the boss at a university I would make all teaching staff put all of the content needed to teach their course material online in some wiki of sorts, with credits for researchers and undergraduates if they can add to that body of knowledge. In fact I would make it so that PhD. thesii didn't just sit on some shelf unread, such works would have to go into the body of knowledge created. Within one year something tangible could be created. Clearly it would not be possible to upload those 'Harry Potter' books studied by Media Studies stoodentz, however, for anything science there should be no need to run into copyright problems.
With such a system any graduate that had maintained pages or added notable content could put the links on their CV for an employer to read.
This could be a fully virtuous circle with better students rather than necessarily wealthier students attracted to the university. From those students there would not be an outflow of money to the textbook-scam-artists (or to the posh restaurants where they wine and dine teaching staff).
The business of a university is to teach, not to sell text books.
One thing though. This is doable in science because, well a theorem is a theorem. But about humanities where you have to study specific texts or corpora? I don't think there's much choice there..
You should understand that you're probably asking for a significant change in contract conditions which gives you Intellectual Property rights over your employee's work.
By saying "in some wiki of sorts", you mean that the university would gain the right of distribution in the way that they (commercially) see fit, rather than the author being able to use their own work. Requiring that the work is uploaded in a particular format will also cause untold headaches.
My employer insisted that I sign a contract like this (giving up my IP), I refused because it would have caused problems with my other work (I literally could not consider it), and I ended up quitting over this.
Textbook authors are generally not scammers. They are people trying to make a living from their expertise - expertise both in their subject and in their ability to communicate, which are skills otherwise undervalued by society. Your beef is with the publishers, not with the content creators who you are punishing here.
Why does the current system exist as you suggest? I mean, why do teaching employment contracts allow employees to retain IP they create in the course of their employment?
On reflection, I think the answer to your version of the question is that experienced teachers are expected to bring their teaching resources with them to new employment. Other people's resources are generally just not as useful. Having an employer hold exclusive right to the IP would be counter-productive to industry best practice on this point.
But, things are indeed changing in the direction that the grandparent commenter indicates.
I wonder whether this is true. I believe that someone else's teaching resources might be harder (i.e. less useful) for a _teacher_. However, I find it hard to believe that teaching resources (like lecture notes or lesson plans) don't vary in quality and that, therefore, the teachers with the worst materials are doing their students a disservice by using the materials which are easiest for them by virtue of being familiar, although better (for the student) alternatives exist.
Just use the best ones. There are no unique snowflakes.
(BTW I take your point about reversing the question. It's a little tricky to find the 'right' answer for software companies because code within a company is more tightly coupled than teaching resources for different courses are in a school.)
Currently writing textbooks is classified as "research", considered entirely the professor's own initiative, and therefore done either as part of a regular year's research time, or during a sabbatical (which is a period of 100% research time). If you reclassified textbook writing to be part of "teaching", i.e. your official teaching duties when assigned to teach a course involve not only teaching the course but also writing a textbook for it, you'd need to budget sufficient time to write the book into the teaching budget. This would typically require either reducing the number of courses the professor teaches per semester, or increasing the % of their time which is budgeted as teaching. Institutions are generally reluctant to do either of those, for a mixture of budgetary reasons (teaching is usually paid internally) and recruiting reasons (if you have an 80% teaching load at your university, you will have trouble recruiting researchers who have offers from 50%-teaching-load institutions, or from corporate research labs).
So, do teaching materials prepared during 'teaching time' become the IP of the employer?
In my day job I don't think I would last long if I wrote code on the company time and then charged a backhander for the instructions/user manual. Yes I could claim it was my IP but it wouldn't wash, would it?
As for textbook authors, there will always be a market for 'study guides' and such like that can give a student an advantage over their peers. These should compete on merit, i.e. being better than what that 'lousy lecturer wrote', but their purchase should not be a pre-requisite.
That's how textbooks used to be.
As others have pointed out, a wiki for any material is kind of a non-starter as it would depend on the IP rights at the university. At mine, all IP is owned by the creator (with the university having non-exclusive rights to use it), with a few exceptions.
Most professors I know don't assign their own books. In my department, I only know of one (or two depending on how you count it). The one is a grad course and is really one of the few on the topic (and is actually written by ten different authors, not just the professor). My supervisor assigns his advanced dynamics text for his course, but they're sold through the copy centre (at the standard copy rate) as they're bound photocopies. I think they were under $30 which is far less than alternatives.
My university requires that all Master's and Ph.D. theses (not thesii) be made available electronically (as PDFs) as has since 2002. So, they don't just sit on a shelf. So, both my Master's and my Ph.D. thesis are on the web for anyone to download (and I have them linked from my LinkedIn page).
Many universities require graduate theses be made available electronically, so I don't see where your issue is with that. I can't see a wiki being any better than a simple search engine for theses. For example, one could have material that fits all over a wiki in one thesis. My Master's research is still being cited by two very disparate disciplines. Both theses of mine are easily found using Google Scholar with appropriate search terms (i.e., ones applicable to the content). My Master's even has two citations just last year.
How is one supposed to put links on a CV for pages edited by many authors?
I know of no professors who are wined and dined by textbook publishers. I know that publishers send review copies and they do meet with professors, but all the meetings I know of have happened in professors offices or a meeting room.
The one (small) downside for me was the resell process, or even resell possibility. You can't sell them on Amazon. Most of the time I just kept the good books for myself, to maybe use in the future. At the end, a lot of the times it cost me less to go with the international edition and keep it, than buy the original edition and resell it.
So, import away!
I found it amusing when we had a representative from a publisher speak at the first lecture for a subject. He had a slide saying "buy locally" and was encouraging students to buy his ebook which was twice the price of the international edition I had already purchased but marginally cheaper than his print edition.
The end result is that students are not buying textbooks anymore and those that do are importing them from overseas. The independent co-operative bookshop at my university went out of business last year as a result. The university opened their own bookshop with ridiculously high prices as well, but minimal staffing from what I could tell. I don't think they can sustain the high prices in the long term without the whole thing falling in a heap.
Also many Science departments insist on the newest editions of books which the library will not stock past one or two reference copies.
Most university libraries will get you books on request, but that often doesn't cover set texts (they will ask you to wait for the reference copy).
That strikes me as very unusual.
For most books, you should hold off buying as long as possible as the class might not actually even use them. Some you may only need for homework problems, which you can usually borrow from a friend in class. If the prices have really gotten this out of hand, students should just start forming their own sharing/copying groups and make that the accepted norm. Let the publishers reap what they've sown and extract their pound of flesh exactly once.
The bigger problems, IMO, are "homework systems" or "virtual labs" where you are required to pay a superfluous charge to a textbook publisher because professors are too lazy to grade homework. So you either buy a brand new copy of your intro algebra book for $130 and get a 'free' "MyMathLab" code, or you can just buy the code for $115. (e.g.: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/MyMathLab-St...)
You'll note at that point, they don't need to produce a new edition every year that renumbers the problem set, because they're going to get their pound of flesh anyway, and you can buy an old book - but you still won't be able to pass the course, because professors require you do the homework through this 'system'.
I can price my book so that when someone buys it, after taxes and all that I can at least buy myself a coffee while working on the next project. I see it as a "Thank you for helping me, here's a coffee".
I understand that books from larger publishing houses are more expensive because there are more people that needs a coffee to some extent there's just too large of a margin or too many coffees that needs to be handed out.
Based on how many copies I've sold from self-publishing I've been able to get myself more than a coffee, but the individuals that bought the book didn't have to suffer too much economically as I don't price the book in the range of a new mobile phone.
Why would someone buy for example Product Design and Development 5th Edition which costs approx 190$ ?
In West, it is a recommended book in most colleges. But in India, it is not the book our teacher/college refers to as the main content.
By 'main content' I mean that even though on average 5-6 books are recommended reads but most teachers have read 1-2 books thoroughly, and others slightly for non-repetitive reasons.
PS: I have read the above mentioned book in a library, its totally NOT worthy of that price.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/education/29textbooks.html
http://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editio...
http://www.quora.com/Why-are-textbooks-so-expensive-in-Weste...
Does anyone have experience with the 10% copyright rule?
Even more interestingly---students could peer review their solutions to the problems.
I understand that there is a huge amount of money involved, but surely the only stakeholders who benefit are:
1) The publishers, for obvious reasons
2) The authors, as they may get a healthy sum of money for writing a given text book.
3) (possibly) the teachers, if they get bribed into using a particular book in their curriculum.
Lets forget about the publishers, because they are for-profit businesses who do not have the students best interest at heart. We'll also forget about the teachers, because this type of bribing is not common in my experience (teachers I know tend to go for what they already know, rather than the new shiny book which came to them in the mail). Also, we can presume that teachers are not in the business of squeezing every last dollar out of their students.
As for the authors, I don't have an issue with people making money by writing text books. I know a few academics and industry people who are able to pursue more interesting goals because they have money coming in from books they've written. BUT THIS IS THE TINY MINORITY. Of all of the academics who would be capable of writing a chapter for, e.g. an introductory programming book, I would randomly estimate that only 0.1% of them have written a text book that is used in universities. If another 5% of them got together and contributed to an open source text book on the topic, that was liberally licensed and free for students to obtain and distribute, then why should we not embrace that?
I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough for doing such things [0]. However, surely just doing it for the good of education and teaching is motive enough?
Every now and again I see books come up on hacker news which seem like quite good resources (recently it was a cryptography book, another time it was a link to a github repo for a specific field of mathematics). It would be great if these projects could take off, and become the bibles for their relevant areas. And if a particular academic institution disagrees with the teaching of the book, don't go out and prescribe expensive text books to your students. Rather, fork the (e.g. CC-licensed) book that they are not happy with, and change it. Or better yet, submit a pull request, discuss the issues with the maintainers, and hopefully resolve the issue amicably.
It just astounds me that this is not a thing.
[0] - This occurs a lot in discussions about how companies such as Google try to get artwork from people at zero cost, citing that the artist will get "exposure".
In my country there is currently a debate because we used to have a relatively big "industry" of photocopied textbooks because of the high prices of books.
Some weeks or months ago, the police closed a lot of this places that photocopied books (mostly in front of the law school oh the irony), and now, nobody wants to photocopy books.
I got really angry (not because I photocopied books, I have most of my book in pdf) but because the state university (the biggest and for some the best) likes to talk about how "anyone" can study for free (as in beer ;) but nobody talks about the huge bill of books you have if you buy them legally.
I thought about some kind of wiki-like platform for books where not only teacher, but also students can collaborate to create and maintain the books.
I would love to see this in reality, I wanted to start it myself, but really don't have the time/resources to get to it.
Kerosene is/was subsidised in many places (e.g. India), I think because every needs to eat (and therefore everyone needs fuel for their stove.)
As someone currently doing something like that, I'd say it massively complicates the process of getting a coherent book finished this decade. The first issue is that people never deliver their chapters on time! Everyone's busy, and it's like herding cats to get a bunch of well-known people to deliver a manuscript, which is usually not the most pressing thing on their TODO list. (I'm guilty of it also.) The second issue is that if you want it to be a coherent textbook, vs. more of a collection-of-tutorials style anthology, everyone has to be on the same page about the overall approach the textbook is taking, and the chapters have to fit together closely. This is particularly important when later material builds on earlier material, and needs to do so in a way that works pedagogically (as is almost always the case in a CS textbook). Which requires a lot more Skype meetings and usually iteration on the chapters.
In our case we tackled it by having three primary "in-house" authors, at the same institution, who decided on the overall approach of the textbook, and outlined the whole thing. At least one of us was then also a co-author on every chapter; external contributors were invited within this context, to write part of a chapter in collaboration with us. This helped integrate the external contributions a bit more easily, and made sure they fit in to the book. And we had only about 8 external contributors. I would definitely not want to go all the way to having completely separate chapters written by different people and try to integrate them, and get the book finished before 2020.
The short version is: it's a good idea, but integrating multiple people's contributions into a coherent textbook is hard. If you take 10 people, and take 1 chapter each from the textbook they would've each written if they were writing the whole thing, the most likely result is not a coherent textbook, but 10 chapters that don't really fit together. Not just in the sense that you'd word things a bit differently, but that you'd organize the book completely differently and emphasize completely different material, so the result doesn't introduce material in a progression that's useful to a reader trying to learn the subject.
I agree that the coherency of the text book would be poor if everything was written by different authors. In fact, it is often so jarring when I read a journal article with different writing styles, that it is one of the easiest ways for me to identify plagiarism in student work or when reviewing for journals.
I guess the answer would be to have particularly committed and experienced editors like you mentioned in your attempt.
Perhaps if the book started of as quite a basic book, with key concepts, written by one person. Then, over time, that person (or small group of people) could accept pull requests from the community, and modify them to fit the style of the original book.
This could work quite similarly to most open source software projects:
1) Start of with one or a few people
2) Build only enough functionality for a working/useful piece of software
3) Over time, build up functionality via community contributions (and further contributions from the original contributors)
4) The direction of the project is steered by a group of people with its best interest in heart
Note how in the example of software, there is a fully working thing (even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles attached) quite early in the process. Also, the overall vision for the project is kept in line by the original maintainer, who runs an eye over each pull requests and is free to make suggestions for changes. If there is any major disagreements, people from the community are free to fork the software and make it suit their needs.
I don't know how practical this is, in that a text book without huge amounts of detail may have less usefullness than a piece of software without huge amounts of functionality. Perhaps there are some fields which would benefit from such an approach, while others really do need to have a comprehensive, "finished" book to be of any use to anyone.
For math and physics you can get pretty far with definitions and key formulas. As for succinctness of the explanations, it all depends of the "level of description" for the coverage. The more math notation used, the shorter the text will be, but also less readable.
In addition to the notation, you must control the vocabulary and the level of abstraction which you use in the narrative. The language level in advanced math textbooks is level="grad student", most science textbooks assume level="some college", most science news articles are level="high school", general media assume level=middle school", except Fox and CNN who give primary-school-level explanations of World politics.
In my experience, writing explanations for the "some college"-level readers can be quite succinct so I think your idea of a pared-down minimum viable textbook is possible. For example, a short intro to machine learning could start from 100pp of short-form lecture notes that explains the basic ideas and formulas, solved example problems and maybe some code---godda have some code in there if it's about ML. Writing such a text is just 6 months of work, whereas writing a full ML book would take years. Once the basic notation, definitions, and math prerequisites are written down, there could be 20-30 separate applications chapters (10-30pp each) where a single idea of ML is described by someone knowledgeable about it (perhaps not a researcher, the best would be a grad student). Bonus points for complete code examples. Pull requests for typo-fixes and requests for additional explanations ensue. And Bam!, ML textbook v1.0 done. A textbook in a year.
(v2.0 one year later can add more applications, add applications of the applications, or additional introductory material (tutorials) to make the book more accessible.)
> it is often so jarring when I read a journal article with different writing styles,
I think this will be and important problem with book-collab projects... How do you meld the voices (and egos!) of 30 people in a single narrative?
> I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough for doing such things. However, surely just doing it for the good of education and teaching is motive enough?
I presume you must be under 30 from your statement since: Anyone who is under 30, and is not a leftist, has no heart; and anyone who is over 30, and is not a capitalist, has no brains. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed)
There must be some sort of monetary incentive. Maybe "book writing" funding from fed-gov or prov/state-govs? Maybe paid by universities? Either way there must be money involved if we want to motivate people to invest one year of full time work to write a book on subject X. Making money of the printing seems like the best choice to me... and, interestingly, charging for printing is totally compatible with GFDL.
I think print-on-demand and self-publishing is a good first start---it puts more power in authors' and readers' hands, which are the only people that matter in the value chain. It's going to get very interesting in the book publishing sector in the coming years, I promise ;)
This reminds me of one of the other frequent failure points of having authors each write a chapter: they write a chapter that is really more of a survey paper about their favorite technique (maybe one they invented or have worked on). Usually that ends up with a choice of content and writing style that's a poor fit for a textbook. A grad student writing about something that is not their own research might be a way of avoiding that.
I agree some kind of incentive is probably needed. It could be monetary, could be advancement-based, depends on the people writing and their situation. On the other hand, money might help for both: if there were grants for textbook writing, which e.g. a professor could use to buy out some of their own teaching and pay their summer salary, it'd also help out with the angle of "if I spend a year writing this book instead of journal articles, will I still get [tenure | full professor | etc.]?", because getting grant money is usually counted as a plus for advancement.
There are some areas that have stronger internal incentives, mostly those in which there is significant controversy, and people have strong opinions about the Right Way to do something. The belief that existing books were doing it wrong and he could write one that introduced things correctly was what motivated Robert Harper to write his 2012 programming languages textbook, for example. Another variant of this is if there are no textbooks on a subject so far, and you feel it's as a result being overlooked: then writing a textbook can be a form of evangelism for your new field. There is less incentive to write a good textbook "for free" on established and uncontroversial subjects.
Missed the school since many benefit by getting a % on each sale. Higher price equals more money.