Thought I would bump this thread to post a link to a recent SMBC comic that is right on point: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3621#comic.
Another aspect of this is the royalties paid to textbook authors – they are incredibly small.
A friend has recently written/edited a 400+ page book. It’s a general overview of current issues in a rather restricted graduate level field. (Probably used mostly as supplemental material than a course textbook.)
The book sells for $79.95 on Amazon, $69.95 from the publisher or bookstores. The author/editor receives $4.75 for each copy sold thru the publisher or bookstores, nothing for copies sold by Amazon. That’s only about 6.7% of the sales price!* So the high price of textbooks certainly isn’t due to high royalties paid to writers.
- I asked him why he bothered, at such a low rate of pay. For the hours he put in, he could do better tutoring students. Or working at McDonald’s!
He said because published books give him academic credentials, get him invited to speak at conferences, and get him hired to teach more courses. And because he likes the field, and doing research in it.
That’s not unique to textbooks. Skip over the 200 or so A-list authors who pretty much set their own terms, and most authors make money only if they’re lucky enough to hit enormous sales volume. (The percentage remains dismayingly low.) A few thousand copies a year brings some nice out-to-dinner money, not much more.
The last being the only valid reason for any blockhead to write a book.
But the rest of it sounds like every “intern” job on Craiglist - come use your deep expertise and skills to do a shitload of free work for us because it will look so good on your resume/in your portfolio. (Is there a “101 Tips for Business” book out there that promotes this underhanded shit, or does every middling-small business owner have that moment of brilliance in which they figure out they can “hire” an “intern” to do specialized, often costly work for free… and believe they are doing them a favor?)
How do they justify that?
Is it a matter where, if a customer buys the book from Amazon, the order is actually fulfilled by a third party out of their own stock (which they would have to have bought from the publisher at some point, at which time the author would have been compensated)? Or is it something more direct and unfair than this?
As I understand it, Amazon’s justification is that they can.
They are big enough in the bookselling marketplace to demand that publishers sign contracts with them that let Amazon keep the author royalties for themself – otherwise their books don’t get on Amazon.
Possibly this is different for the few big-name authors, or possibly their publisher pays them a royalty anyway & eats the cost. But for small sales textbook authors, they just fon’t get any royalty for Amazon sales. (Back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, that was called a monopoly, and the government stepped in to protect us from such things.)
German here, Technical University of Munich.
So far, not one of my classes has had any sort of required reading. There were books that were recommended as an addition to the slides presented in the lecture in almost every class, and those books were, without fail, either present in the university library or given to the class for free as a DRM-free e-book.
You may now start turning green.
Also, yeah, that’s totally bullshit. 