Carpe Datum

Why don't you write one? You're a good writer, great at quoting (heh) and seem to love the topic.

As for Daddy's Girls, some of us had to work to go to college and earn every penny spent on textbooks... grrr. Not everyone has a free ride.

I already write my own lab manual, actually (you can find it on Amazon), but I've never tried to mass-market it or anything. A few more iterations to clean it up, and I might think about trying that. Most places are like us, though, and just use an in-house lab manual written by the person who runs the science labs. So it isn't a big market.

A textbook is a much, much larger undertaking. Getting all the artwork in order is a massive undertaking and much more critical to the success of a textbook than the writing. And the writing isn't trivial either. I know everything in pretty much any introductory textbook backwards and forwards, but writing about it in nice, crisp, readable prose is not easy. Ranting in a blog is one thing, but science writing for a non-science audience ... gah.

Also, if I were to write a textbook that I would want to use in *my* class, I don't imagine there would be many takers. I cover a lot of non-traditional topics in my class, and I cover some topics in a lot more depth than standard texts. My text would likely be much too far outside the mainstream to get serious consideration for adoption.

Anyway, as far as the cost, I know not everyone has a free ride, and I would feel a little worse if I were teaching at a place like a community college or what have you. I would probably encourage the library to keep a few reserve copies and tell students to use those (I've done that before at the request of a few students). If I sent my review check back, it would conceivably lower the book price from $87 to $86.99.

Heh, I find this topic really interesting Observer.

Like Humbaba, I worked 3 jobs and took 20 credits a semester to get through school. But, on the up side, I had no school loans when I got out. Our campus bookstore would let us buy "Used" textbooks at a significantly lower cost. That was really helpful.

Most professors I knew in the sciences used the book more as refernce and expanding on topics rather than strict rote teaching materials. You might be surprised at how many teachers and professors might like a textbook with more interesting topics.

For instance, I had an english professor who co-wrote a Physics textbook. The best part about that textbook was that he talked about the wider implications of the Theory of Relativity, and how it changed completely how people thought and wrote about time. We take that for granted today but at the time it was a truly amazing transformation in the way people thought. It was one of the few textbooks that made me actually see that Physics was really a fun and practical science that had effected society deeply. It gave me much more respect for science and for writers who were inspired by Einstein's work.

Man, textbooks ... they're not what's putting me in debt, but they add that extra oomf to the scramble so that I can get the bill paid before I enroll.

Then again, I'm SO SO glad that I have/had very few science and math classes because those are upwards of 60 bucks even used. Bastards.

Not that I blame you for accepting it or anything. Professors don't get enough monetary appreciation, mostly.

When I was still in the professorial racket half a decade ago, I heard that college textbooks represent a quarter of the *profit* -- not revenue, *profit* -- of the North American publishing industry. The rip-off that drug companies do to senior citizens is nothing compared to what happens to college students.

Just a simple example, from a bookstore proprietor. Try to order (from the publisher) five copies of, say, Hamlet, in paperback. You'll get a per-copy price. Now try to order fifty copies of the same book. Get the per-copy price. The larger order **has a higher per-copy price**, purely because the only circumstances where anybody orders that many copies of a title like that are textbook orders. They are bloodsucking, child-raping vampires.

Going the self-written, self-published route for texts was something I fully intended to as a post-tenure project. Of course, when I bailed out of academia, that fell by the wayside.