Generally speaking, most of us don’t have any critcisms of authors in regards to school books and universities. I certainly don’t begrudge you for whatever money you make writing the books. Our ire is directed at those who set up the system as a whole.
Attended college from 2017-2021. My preference was to try and find a copy of the text online. Next was to find a rental either directly from the university or an online store (at the time, Amazon still rented out paper copies). Then I’d search for a used copy. I’d buy new as a last resort.
Math texts in particular were annoying as most of my math courses used online homework systems which could only be accessed with the purchase of an “access key” bundled with the text book. No choice but to buy new there.
A lot of my upper level courses (civil engineering) straight up used published codes and manuals as opposed to textbooks. For my steel structures course it was the AISC steel manual. For reinforced concrete, it was the ACI-318. These weren’t especially cheap and I think as a practical matter it was sensible to always use the current version. My hydrology course used the state DOT hydraulics manual which was freely available.
At least one course used a text that the original author chose to make freely available. Another course had an online text maintained by the instructor which was also free of charge. Most of my instructors went through some effort to minimize the cost of texts for their students.
My attempts to resell my old texts were universally unsuccessful. The university would never buy them back and the versions were always out of date when my course was over.
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with being a textbook author, at least if your textbooks are any good.
I still remember that my first calculus text cost $3.50 (used–I think the new was $5). Even given the amount of inflation since 1955, the current prices are outrageous.
The prof tht taught my Statistics class went a step further, he wrote a book where each topic started with a chapter at basic level, followed by 2 or 3 chapters that got progressively deeper. Thus he could assign the same one book for several levels of courses. Since he was head of the department, this worked for him.
I saw a rant online about this practice. They mentioned the access key came with the textbook (so, need to buy both) and was valid for only one semester, so was useless to resell or even to go back and review what you had done online after the class was over. The online material was the assignments, submitted online with your access ID, so there was no way to avoid buying the access key and no way to share a key.
I know my wife’s paper-only (no electronic) Accounting 101 course 10 years ago, the textbooks - a set of 3 - cost about $350. Somewhere in the basement I have my university texts from the 1970’s which range about $10 to $20, and then another set from the mid-80’s in the $30-$60 range. Schaum’s outlines (I have a few) were the best summary of most material, typically about $13.