Somewhat cynically, I think the point of many textbooks is to make money for the authors.

There is no reason why a calculus book needs to cost $200 (in the 1990’s) and get refreshed every 2-3 years. That subject has been known for hundreds of years and they rob poor engineering and science student of that $200.

Sorry, I just have a bad taste in my mouth from crap like that in undergrad. Not saying you’re wrong, just think it’s more greed oriented than we’d like to think.

No, almost nothing of the $200 actually goes to the author. A typical share goes like this: (concrete numbers for Germany) 50% of the sticker price goes to the book seller, 7% to tax, the remainder to printing, typesetting, logistics, the publishing house etc.

A typical author would get somewhere between 4-7% of the net sales. Most books, especially advanced science books, on the market (not your College 101, not NYT bestsellers) sell only in the order of hundreds, maybe a few thousand copies. The vast majority of books doesn't even earn the advance back. The reason why they are often not good, is that it takes months to write 500 pages of well-thought out, well-delivered material, and the incentive to do that for $5000 is relatively low.

1,000 students per semester times $10 bucks is money I wouldn’t mind having.

Professors write tons of pages on various topics as part of their job. We call that “research”. Not sure why contributing to a book effort should be looked at any differently than research papers.

Plus, from an economic sense, when you lower the price of a compliment, your demand g or price ) goes up. So it’s actually in a university’s interest to provide books for free (or very low cost).

The few thousand copies is over the _entire_ lifetime of a book, not meant per year. Again, your College 101 book in Physics or Calculus will be used in large courses and thus sell a large volume, if it is being that used that is. There are also many competitors in the market, and yours might not see significant pickup.

So, let's suppose that you indeed sell 1,000 copies at $150 a piece. Your share is 6% of the net sales, so $8370. From this you need to pay services such as the person making the index, or pay royalty for pictures (yes, many publishing houses deduct this from the author's earnings).

Let's say your book has 700 pages, which is pretty normal volume size, and after you paid for additional services and expenses you are left with $7000. You are a good writer, so planning the book, writing it, creating examples, copy-editing and rewriting it, making reference solutions, etc. and you only spend on average 4h per page. You have made $2.50 / hour before tax. And you probably have a PhD in that topic.

Not only that, but the books are horrible! Authors are incentivized to throw as much verbiage as possible, and this makes students' lives more difficult. It is much preferable to have a more concise book that goes to the core of what you need to learn.

Agreed 1,000,000% !

If Stan Lee wrote calculus textbooks, everyone would be good at math. [0]

[0] - ok, so I came up with that off the top of my head. But the more I think about it, the better the idea seems to me. Any thoughts?

I've heard about this, it seems to be an American phenomenon. I taught applied mathematics at a UK Russel group university for 10 years, I started each course with "You do not need any books for this course, the lectures suffice; if you want to read around the subject I would recommend [2 or 3 Dover editions at £10-15] or [a couple of classics I was sure were in the library]". Most other lecturers did the same.

Books form an interesting part of this HN posting anyway: I'm from East Germany and at that time I got much of the mathematical scientific literature as quite cheap (regarded to money, even workmanship, but not to content) russian translations from the Soviet Union. They were also quite fast in producing these, very close to the original publication (*).

The pricing model of the current locked-in science publication sector is completely ridiculous, counter-productive and even unjustified (research in many countries is supported by taxes, than the result should be free to the public). But luckily this changes with open access - legal and not yet legal.

edit: and not to forget, in some areas the soviet school of mathematics (meant as specific incarnation of mathematics as a discipline in the country) was excellent in itself.

> point of textbooks is to educate people on some topic so making them as easy as possible seems like the correct choice

It is not possible to “educate” someone about mathematics or math-heavy technical fields without convincing them to put in some serious time and effort thinking deeply about hard problems.

Many US high school (and even undergraduate) textbooks are more or less analogous to taking a look-out-from-the-bus tour of rock climbing sites, or maybe like teaching an advanced wood shop class by making students assemble IKEA furniture.

Textbooks should be exciting and fun, but “as easy as possible” is a terrible goal.

I think they mean "as easy as possible," in the sense of Einstein(?;) - 'An explanation should be as easy as /possible/, but not easier;' or something like that. - (?)

I and all this ^ might be wrong, though.

I have actually learned an awful lot from assembling Ikea furniture. Some of those patterns make their way into my own little projects nowadays.