I used to work at a large and well-known academic publisher, and the main thing I learned at company all hands meetings was that senior leadership had no desire to make money by simply making and selling products that people wanted to buy. They were always much, much more preoccupied with coming up with schemes to compel people to purchase their products.
My dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this...
My childhood was spent with him complaining about pressure from his academic publisher to release "new editions". OT programs around the world would update the syllabus to call for the latest edition even though my dad (the guy writing the book) thought it was ridiculous that he had to essentially re-hash and re-word the same material over and over again. Looking back on it he was really dismayed and demotivated by the whole thing but he understood that's just how things are.
According to his Wikipedia page he wrote at least seven editions of his two main works... Academic publishing long-ago addressed the secondary market issue.
In terms of the blockchain aspect of this - generally anyone who thinks these existing institutions (up to and including governments) are just going to sit on their hands and forgo revenue "because blockchain" they're not living in reality. If anything (as we see here) blockchain is going to be used to as another tool to boost their revenue (assuming it ever gets any real traction anyway).
I went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition.
I don't think it fooled many people, but on the other hand, people keep wanting to eat. It does feel like there are a lot more productive uses of human work, but that's true for a lot of the economy.
There is a downside to the alternative. My Discrete Math 2 course syllabus listed a book out of print since the 80s. The only way to get a copy of the book would have been on ebay for old copies for hundreds of dollars. Thankfully we didn't use it in the actual class.
Yeah, the issue there is copyright, otherwise it would be trivial to reprint it in some form or other. Obviously the solution is open source texts for elementary to intro college level textbooks, and I can't imagine any real argument to that by anyone who isn't affiliated with a publisher.
Forgoing the copyright debate, if the book isn't like a Gutenberg Bible or something then an owner could always unbind it, send it through a scanner, and share a pdf. I've also seen instructions on building a DIY book scanner that's a lot more labor intensive but does not require damaging the book.
I had professors share PDFs of textbooks with the class, and I've been the person to torrent textbooks and provide them to classes full of people.
There are ways around the textbook industry, and the industry is so scummy they really deserve to have their works distributed in a way that doesn't give them any revenue.
Thanks for sharing - I"m curious why he couldn't have declined to write a new edition? What were the incentives such that he felt compelled to play this game? Were royalties time limited or do they just present an ultimatum to rewrite or they'll find the next up-and-coming gunner to write a new version?
If he were still alive he would definitely be retired by now and I'm sure I could ask him. With that some conjecture on my part...
Despite being top of his field he was a professor, department head, and dean at a state school (University of Illinois). The current department head (according to the Illinois Salary Database) has a total compensation of $177,386.64 annually.
Adjusted for inflation to the last year he as was alive (2010) this would have been roughly $142,000. Considering the level of education, work load, stature, etc this isn't exactly impressive. Being in tech my first position when I was 21 years old I was making more money than his salary at the time (2006 or so).
Additionally, shortly after taking the department head position at UIC they were consistently ranked as a top 3 OT program by US News. His income was supplemented by adjunct professorships around the world, book sales (almost nothing from what I remember), and speaking engagements. More important than income was maintaining stature and standing in the field to if nothing else keep the department ranking. I'm sure there was plenty of pressure from the university on that.
It's not difficult to imagine this is a vicious cycle. Between "publish or perish", the pressure to maintain department and personal standing, etc all of this was essentially part of the game. He was a total package deal across the board.
From what I understand the model he developed is the most widely practiced OT model in the world (to this day). At a certain point I suppose a decision to "get out of the game" and maintain nothing other than his professorship could have very well resulted in losing everything - I don't know that tenure could even have saved him from that.
Even though he made practically no money from book sales more or less "writing the book" in his field was the vehicle that drove the entire thing.
It's not hard to imagine that getting off the treadmill could have resulted in him being relegated as a washed-up has-been to a C-level program somewhere.
There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too.
FYI for any current students or parents of students: check the library for textbooks before doing anything else. Even if they don't have it, most universities have a system to check out books from other libraries that are "in network". I learned about this after my freshman year and didn't pay a dime for textbooks the rest of my time in school.
bonus crypto complaint: it's really sad to imagine crypto/blockchain tech being used to force students (or anyone) to pay for library books.
One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy.
The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked.
When I was in college, textbook companies started rolling out "online portal codes". For many core classes, the industry sells these codes to submit homework that require a new license each semester, regardless of whether your textbook is new or used. They cost hundreds of dollars apiece, the software sucks, and it doesn't fit with the coursework. It's clearly a grift.
I swore back in college that if I ever made it big, I'd hire academics to write textbooks to license under Creative Commons, then push them to state representatives, university presidents, and students.
This industry is part of the problem. The other is easily accessible loans with no spending caps, and college admins with no desire to stop growing.
I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door.
Those academics published their own course notes, and printed spiral bound texts on campus with reading included. Able to be purchased for $10 each. They wrote their own presentations.
We did have some textbooks, though only for particularly advanced subjects, and those were the sort of texts whose content doesn't change particularly much.
The issue with the predatory practices, as you rightly point out, is that some institutions, for whatever intrinsic reasons, are prepared to accept the predatory lock in business practices which disadvantage students and create an exorbitant amount of waste.
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too.
As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook.
That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster.
Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
Back in the day, it cost $0.05-0.10 a copy at the student library, sometimes even free, if you knew the guy/gal working that day. I suppose with the internet being in the palm of your hand, there’s less reasons to be in the library, but back in the day, you’d be in the library 2-3 times a week.
Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
A looot of universities use online homework tools from the big textbook publishers especially for first year classes. Each new book has a code the students can use to access the homework included. Buy a used book and you now need $80 or whatever code often making it more than the new book.
Worst part is there is open source tools that are similar but take effort to setup and host so universities don't use them.
Yes it is. Publishers already try to sabotage reuse and resale of their print textbooks by tying them to single-use codes for their digital platform, which they somehow lure instructors into using.
Instructor collusion with this is really a sort of professional malpractice that should be banned by the educational institution, but of course institutions are bribed with kickbacks from the publishers. Yet it would be more efficient for the institution just to raise tuition and fees which are charged to students directly.
The publishers offer "free grading" of homework from the textbook, but it is one time use. It really is a bribe to the teachers so they no longer have to grade homework in exchange for the student buying a book at full price that they can't resell.
There really should be a class action lawsuit against publishers and schools for this behavior.
I used to work at a large and well-known academic publisher, and the main thing I learned at company all hands meetings was that senior leadership had no desire to make money by simply making and selling products that people wanted to buy. They were always much, much more preoccupied with coming up with schemes to compel people to purchase their products.