$150 for a textbook? it’s virtually free, said the parent of a pre-med student
First year chem was $500, which was $300 for the text (not used of course, not available), another $100 for the lab workbook + access code, and $100 for study guide and solved problems or what have you. Organic Chem was a steal at $300 and Calc I at $200, as they’re reused for Orgo 2 and Calc 2 respectively. Typical book fees are easily $800 a semester for us.
The access code for homeworks online is pretty sinister as it kills the second hand market or online sellers.
How much authors make? not a whole lot. Much of it goes to the publisher.
Most textbook authors make a pittance. A few make it big if the book is a widely adopted perennial best-seller, but that’s a tiny fraction of all the textbooks published. I’d guess that most textbook publishers barely break even on many of the titles they publish, even at those high prices, simply because the market is relatively small and their fixed costs are relatively high. They make up for it on volume sales of the most widely adopted books. The “racket,” in my opinion, isn’t the royalties that textbook authors receive, but rather the publishers’ practice of putting out a new edition every few years, even if there’s not that much new in the field. This is done for the express purpose of killing the after-market in used books, for which the publisher and author receive nothing.
In the sciences, it is possible to earn quite a lot in textbook royalties, as the author of a book for an introductory course that is widely adopted, so that there are hundreds of thousands of purchasers each year. In addition to the physics text by Halliday and Resnick, other examples that come to mind are the calculus text by Thomas, the calculus text by Stewart, the organic chemistry text by Morrison and Boyd, Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, Merzbacher’s Quantum Mechanics, and Huang’s Statistical Mechanics. (Some of these may no longer be in use, but they had runs of about 20 years or so). A typical general chemistry text is likely to have 6 or 7 authors. The standard royalties are split among them–they don’t gain extra royalties for the extra authors.
From a research monograph, I’d guess one would be lucky to earn $1000 in royalties, total. There are always library sales.
Cobrat is correct that going on sabbatical to write an undergraduate text, or even writing an undergraduate text without going on sabbatical, would not be a “career move” for a science faculty member at a research university. Writing a research monograph could be a good move (YMMV), but the main purpose of a sabbatical in the sciences is to gain expertise in a new, but related specialty.
Sometimes people write undergraduate texts because they don’t like what’s available in the area, though.
One of my undergrad math profs at a large, public research university wrote a text on topology. He donated the royalties from sales in the same state to the university, on the grounds that the people of the state had paid his salary. He kept the royalties from sales in other states. I don’t think it was a lot of money, in any case.
Getting rich from a textbook is just a little more likely than winning Powerball. And at any major research U you get no significant credit towards tenure or promotion for a textbook.
Actually, Profs get NO CREDIT for tenure/promotion for textbooks. And a tenure-track Prof whose CV only consists of textbooks tends to be regarded as someone who has misplaced his/her professional priorities.
And it’s not limited to Research Us. LAC Profs on the tenure track…especially those in the elite/respectable tiers would likewise face the same issue if all they had on their CV was textbooks.
I know several folks who wrote chapters and whole textbooks. None of them are rich and several of them got exactly NOTHING for their hard work, other than salary that they earned for their full-time jobs. I guess it depends a great deal and I believe most of any profit goes to the publisher instead of any of the authors.
Guess it makes sense why some instructors who write textbooks for their own convenience (i.e. because they did not like any of the existing ones) just put them up at no cost on the course web sites.
A publishing executive whom I met at a reception years ago said that the only millionaire professor whom he knew became wealthy as a result of writing textbooks was Richard Hofstadter, the government and political science scholar.
As for the textbook budget at our house, Lake Jr. did fine with older editions, used books, and the relatively cheap Global Editions. We spent a fraction of the list price for Lake Jr.'s STEM textbooks. He just purchased the Global Edition of a Probability & Statistics textbook which the campus bookstore is selling new for $150. A fresh copy of the Global Edition sells for $35. Same content and same build quality as any typical American paperback book.
Depends—at many teaching institutions, a textbook totally counts. This is one reason a lot of textbooks are produced by professors at what a lot of CC types think of as “second-tier” institutions—those are the places where the incentives reward writing textbooks.
Basically, though, the profit from textbook sales goes to the publishers. The bookstore gets a little bit, the author gets a little bit, but for each of those, aside from a very, very few cases that sometimes get trotted out to be treated as if they were the norm, it’s only a very little bit.
For each popular book in some fields there may be an instructors manual, a student study guide, and a test bank. As a grad student, I got paid $750 a long time ago for co-authoring an instructor’s manual with my professor who wrote the textbook. Supplemental materials for popular texts often are written by faculty at smaller schools who get paid a small amount and get some acknowledgement in their annual review. Most of these materials are online these days. I have friends who have co-authored test banks.
When I asked my LAC Profs or some Profs at a few LACs ranked above and below my alma mater they mentioned textbooks which didn’t contribute original research/new interpretations to their respective fields/subfields didn’t count for them for tenure/promotion purposes.
@cobrat: You have to remember that high- to highish-ranked LACs are as research-oriented in terms of what faculty are expected to produce as R2s (under the old classification system), if not R1s for the highest-end LACs. The “LAC” label is an insanely overbroad one, really.
It depends.
Some here are directly involved (or pretty closely connected,) speaking of their experiences or observations, while others are going on indirect info from who knows what level of discussion. Or, when.
And it’s odd to think tenure considerations, down to a textbook on the CV, are a common topic in a casual convo.
Writing textbooks can count as part of your annual review (which determines annual pay raises) even if they don’t help faculty get promoted or tenured. The tenure decision happens once but annual reviews are obviously every year.
