How the Textbook Industry Tries to Hook Professors

This fails to mentions some of the best &quot;hooks&quot; they&#x27;ve got: tools to reduce lecture prep time, assignment prep, and grading.<p>I&#x27;ve seen textbooks whose online content for instructors include a full deck of (extremely uninspired) powerpoint slides. And I&#x27;ve seen lazy profs use them.<p>Web-based assignments with automated grading are also powerful hooks. Like the prepared slides, they discourage instructors from engaging with the material, providing any unique insights from their own experience, or actually working with students to achieve understanding.

I once asked a professor - why you don&#x27;t tell the students that they can get older version of the text book that&#x27;s 90% cheaper, and the content is essentially the same - to which he replied, he isn&#x27;t allowed to say it in the class because of the deal their school has with the university book store and the publisher.<p>But he also said, he drops hints about it in the first class. On the syllabus it says &#x27;X book or other versions&#x27;. It&#x27;s up-to the student to figure our what it means.<p>It&#x27;s especially heartbreaking when you find someone struggling to buy $200 book just to get the online access code, or he will fail the course. He didn&#x27;t even pay that much to sign up for the class.<p>That&#x27;s why initiatives like openstax(by Bill and Melinda gates foundation) and wiki books makes me so happy.

I think this touches on a core problem. When you add a middleman between the product and the consumer you get a painful market. The consumer doesn&#x27;t get to choose his product thus the product gets to market to the middleman and gradually increase it&#x27;s cost to the consumer because the middleman won&#x27;t notice a dollar here and a dollar there, whereas the consumer absolutely would.

Our startup is working to fix the mainstream textbook problem. Specifically, I think the biggest ripoffs are the textbooks for first-year students; they&#x27;re totally full of bullshit, so our mission is to replace them with more concise, and more affordable books.<p>So far we have two titles: one on precalc+mech+calc (3 in 1 for the win), and a second on linear algebra (see my profile for links). We&#x27;re currently looking for authors to write the <i>No bullshit guide to biology</i>, and <i>No bullshit guide to chemistry</i>. If you have teaching or tutoring experience with these subjects, please get in touch.<p>Between the excellent OER books that available, and independent publishers like us, I think we can fix the textbook cartels. I give them 2-3 more years, then they&#x27;re history.

I had a really good survey of automata professor tell us that we could buy the textbook if we wanted, but if we read the slides and&#x2F;or reviewed taped lectures, the textbook would be completely optional.<p>I think the sign of a good educator is when the teacher provides materials that are decoupled from the textbook. I like the idea of making the textbook optional. Of course, this means more work for the instructor (need to develop homework, lectures, supplemental reading&#x2F;slides). And a lot of instructors in university didn&#x27;t care to do this work.