Raghu Parthasarathy writes:
You’re missing out by making your books free—you could have been making over $500k by forcing your students to buy your textbook, like one of my University of Oregon colleagues apparently did!
And people wonder why the public is losing confidence in higher education.
I have assigned my own book for a course (once), but I agonized over it and made sure the e-book was available free through the library (along with a physical reserve book), and I think in total I made about $10 from the course, at best…
The linked news article is from the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Emerald, where Ruby Duncan writes:
A professor within the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance has earned roughly $570,000 in revenue from students in the past four years with his self-published book. . . . The professor, Toby Koenigsberg, teaches the “Popular Songwriting” course at UO, which previously had at times several hundred asynchronous students each term. . . . Koenigsberg is the sole owner of King & Hill Publishing, which publishes his textbook . . . Since Koenigsberg self-published his book, he allegedly received all the revenue from this text. . . .
SOMD students and faculty attempted to raise their concerns to the dean of the SOMD, Sabrina Madison-Cannon, in 2020, according to SOMD faculty who asked not to be identified for confidentiality purposes.
The concerned faculty were told there was a “gray area” in policy for the situation, and nothing was changed at this time. . . .
What about the book itself? Duncan reports:
Students and faculty alike have shared a general feeling that the text is less of a professional source and more so a software tutorial one could access online for free. . . . According to students and faculty, Koenigsberg’s book mainly consists of screenshots outlining how to use GarageBand. GarageBand is an Apple software application that does not exist on Windows software, meaning it can be difficult to access for students without an Apple computer.
“It very much is a glorified GarageBand tutorial,” Maykenzie Freeman, a former student in the SOMD, said. “We didn’t even talk about lyricism, except for maybe one week of the course.” . . .
Austin Godburn, a former student in the SOMD, who is now a music producer, said that it felt like the popular songwriting class was taking advantage of freshmen.
“From my perspective, it was like a collection of PowerPoint slides, not like an actual legitimate text on songwriting,” Godburn said. . . .
“Most people…who make their own materials for their own classes, they just make a PDF packet and publish it [for free],” Drew Nobile, an associate professor of music theory, said.
The article also says, “because of the low profit margins, most professors aren’t motivated by the profit they would receive from assigning a text.” No kidding! I’ve often assigned my own textbooks in the classes I’ve taught . . . I make something like $2 per book for those students who don’t just download the free pdf online. This is not a money-making proposition!
There’s just one thing from the discussion there that bothered me. Again from the news article:
Some SOMD faculty have said since this text was published through his own company, it did not go through any peer review. Koenigsberg did not confirm or deny any questions relating to his book’s review processes.
“The self-published aspect is important here. It’s important because the academic review process, the peer review process, is what assures quality when a scholar does research or writes a book,” Zachary Wallmark, an associate professor of musicology at the SOMD, said.
Peer review serves some useful purposes, but, no, it does not “assure quality”!
What’s really kinda sad is that it seems like this dude might have actually had some talent at some point! He’s an associate professor of jazz piano, and, from his webpage, “Downbeat magazine awarded his composition ‘Song for Aki’ Best Original Song in its 2003 Student Music Awards.”
Maybe he felt that it was ok to scam students out of half a million bucks, if that money could be used for time in the recording studio that he could use to create new masterpieces.
In case you’re curious, here’s Song for Aki. You can listen to it for free; no $89.99 required. Despite you might expect from the title, this song has no words and I also see no connection to Aki. Kind of a disappointment, actually!
One thing missing from the story: the course does not seem to be a required course for anything, so what role does the market response play? Students sign up for the course and appear to buy the book willingly. While I have assigned my own book in courses (with the pittance royalty the publisher provides), the described practice indeed seems shady. But don’t students have some responsibility here?
I will add that I find the whole idea of ‘required’ texts disturbing. Recommended is fine, but requiring a text is something different. Add to that required courses and the role of individual choice and responsibility is further eroded. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Dale:
I like to use required texts. It solves a coordination problem. But the situation described in the above post seems corrupt.
The funny thing to me here is that the textbook pricing situation is already corrupt, just at the publisher level. This is just excluding the middleman. If this were a non-self-published glossy hardback, it could easily cost the same, but the prof would be seeing a pittance.
(I’m only saying this is funny, not that there is a lack of corruption here.)
As one of the previous SOMD students briefly quoted in this piece (and one of the first to bring up this issue to faculty in 2020, leading to me getting contacted years later about it for this report) I can attest to the course being required for my major/degree, and it was the ONLY songwriting course offered… for a degree surrounding popular/commercial music.
“I will add that I find the whole idea of ‘required’ texts disturbing. Recommended is fine, but requiring a text is something different.”
Uh, what? How exactly is a course to be taught if there isn’t required material of some sort?
Information sources abound, and students can/should use whatever resources they choose. For example, my son bought all his engineering texts from overseas distributors to save considerable money. He did not buy the “required” edition of the text and took his chances about making whatever adjustments were needed (sometimes exercises differed slightly, page numbering was different, etc.). While those differences are superficial, a student might decide to use a different text for a subject – realizing that completing assignments might require them to borrow another students book or use a copy in the library to complete assignments. What I object to in “requiring” texts is that these options seem to be discounted if not prohibited. Of course, nobody is prohibiting these things, and Andrew’s point about coordination is valid – but the word “require” really plays no role here. In fact, I think it creates a counterproductive teacher/student role definition. I’m not saying that teachers and students play equal roles in education – but I view the teacher’s role as recommending subject matter, resources, and even feedback. To the extent that people find power over students is necessary, I’ll differ.
Dale: Your reply makes no sense. What do you think “required” means: (1) that the professor threatens the student with expulsion, public flogging, and general ridicule if the text isn’t purchased, or (2) that there’s a book which the professor will use for assigning exercises or readings and that the student realizes “that completing assignments might require them to borrow another students book or use a copy in the library to complete assignments.” The answer is, in fact, (2), as you implicitly acknowledge. There is no “discounting” or prohibition on using other books. In fact, I and every other professor I know are delighted if students read other books.
I think the word “required” makes no sense. If there is no compulsion, then in what sense is it required? Of course, it means the text is what the course is being built around, that the exercises and assigned readings will come from the book, etc. So, while “required” is just a word that encompasses these things, what bothers me about the language is that it represents a role definition that I find counterproductive. I don’t doubt that you and others don’t feel similarly. I recognize that. But I’ve never found it particularly useful for students to see my role as having power over them – they know that well enough after years of schooling, and I frankly find it refreshing to offer them more autonomy than they may be used to.
Agree with Dale. Even “requiring” the book because thats where the exercises come from is stupid and lazy. Xeroxing/scanning a small number of pages for educational purposes is within the fair use doctrine, not that i support “intellectual property” of any kind.
Textbooks for many courses are a rent seeking scam, updated every 3 semesters with different numbering of the exercises and no added value. At city colleges rent seeking textbooks can be a huge fraction of the cost of a course.
Recommend a book, recommend several books, recommend online lectures as supplements, provide PDF of exercises.
The sense in which a course can have a required textbook is that you have no way to get a good grade without buying it, even if you demonstrate mastery of the material. That just seems wrong.
FYI, for most of my courses I don’t require a textbook, supplying my own material, especially if the topic is broad and there isn’t anything appropriate that I’m comfortable with students having to pay money for. (Though in fairness, $100 compared to $11,000 – $34,000 / year tuition is small, even if multiplied at the upper limit by 3 terms x 4 courses.) In my course next term (Fall), I’m using an open source textbook, and requiring it. In some courses, I do think there are excellent and appropriate commercial textbooks, for which following along with insightful writing and exercises is valuable. Apparently, this makes me “stupid and lazy,” according to Daniel Lakeland. (@Daniel: I used to quite enjoy your comments, but you’re increasingly mean and self-righteous. I do hope to enjoy your comments again in the future.)
Raghu. To clarify, Its stupid and lazy if the only reason youre requiring the textbook is so you can say “do problem 7, 9 and 11 on page 81” instead of taking a picture of page 81 and uploading it to your course website
If you believe that the text of the book is valuable and no other source is anywhere near as good thats a different and not at all stupid and lazy reason.
As a guy who did two separate undergrad programs and one of them was at a city college where many low income students were just barely getting by ive seen both approaches and think requiring a $200 textbook for a course that costs $300 in tuition just so you can assign problems by number out of the book is a bad practice and far too common.
Hope that clarifies.
The inevitable cost of a descent into fascism is that I have a short fuse for all things institutional and the like. I’ll try to do better, theres no reason someone like you should feel that I’m calling you out. Thats on me.
Daniel: thank you for elaborating. Your points are good ones.
“Its stupid and lazy if the only reason youre requiring the textbook is so you can say “do problem 7, 9 and 11 on page 81” instead of taking a picture of page 81 and uploading it to your course website”
But that’s still *requiring* it, it’s just providing the requirement in a different form.
“Information sources abound, and students can/should use whatever resources they choose”
This is truly bizarre. So if I’m a philosophy professor and I want them to read, eg, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I shouldn’t actually require the students to read it?
I certainly don’t mean that. But if you have readings you suggest for analysis of Plato, I wouldn’t restrict them to a selected list. Even there, it is fine to say these are essential readings because they represent particular views that you think they need to see, but I wouldn’t prevent them from reading other sources. Again, the question is what is meant by “required.” As others have commented, I now believe the word is meaningless. My objection remains however: it reinforces a role distinction between instructors and students that I find counterproductive. Your “recommendations” should be taken seriously, and there is no need to “require” them.
Dale, required in this context to me means either you purchase the book, or you dont have access to questions assigned for homework that you will be graded on (problems 3,7,11 page 44). This is particularly prominent in Math, Physics, Chem, Engineering, Comp Sci, and other fields where teachers assign homework problems by number and page. Purchasing a used copy becomes impossible because the publishers purposefully scramble the exercise numbering with every new edition leaving the content largely unchanged. Its particularly common for engineering, the content of which is largely unchanged for 50 years but the new editions come out annually knowing that the students will just pay because they expect a future monetary income.
“I certainly don’t mean that.”
So I *can* require them to read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
“Your “recommendations” should be taken seriously, and there is no need to “require” them.”
No, I can only recommend they read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Class discussion is going to be interesting.
The last time I bought a textbook (a Kandel Neuroscience one) it started with something like “There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain”, with no references or explanation of the methods used to arrive at that value. I closed it and never looked at a textbook again. They aren’t required with access to the internet and journal articles.
That someone bothered to organize info on a topic to facilitate learning what is typically believed is still valuable though.
It should be made clearer in textbooks that they are more about pedagogy rather than being strictly correct. The alternative is to have them follow scholarly citation practices, but that seems like too much effort for the purpose.
Anon:
Please don’t do this. You’re just being obnoxious. I’ve written several textbooks, and, yes, they provide information that’s not easily available elsewhere. There’s a reason my coauthors and I write the damn things.
I’m just providing my own experience and opinion on it. In general, just asserting things to be true is standard for the textbook style, which gives a wrong idea (argument from authority) about how successful science works. Then this becomes ingrained in the student’s mind.
But sure, I will blacklist the topic from things to mention here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
Anon:
I’m not asking you to blacklist anything. I’m just asking you not to say things that are obviously stupid. It’s obviously stupid to make a sweeping and negative statement about textbooks (“They aren’t required with access to the internet and journal articles”) in response to a post by someone who’s written several textbooks. My problem is not with your statement, “I closed it and never looked at a textbook again,” it’s with your statement about textbooks in general. It just degrades the discourse on this blog to have comments like this.
Thanks for clarifying. But I stand by my claim textbooks are no longer *required* (I specifically mentioned how they can still be useful*) for those who have access to the internet and primary literature, besides contrived cases like “answer problem 8 on page 50” or whatever.
They were pretty much required before 2010 or so though.
* Like how Gigerenzer describes here for stats: https://sciences.ucf.edu/biology/d4lab/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2023/01/Gigerenzer-2004-Mindless-Statistics.pdf
Afaict, there are simply limitations/incentives inherent to that format that require the author elide over the controversies and give a ‘spherical cow” picture instead. And I get it.
In various places the principle is that students should have sufficient material via (freely available) course notes alone, and that access to pay to play textbooks or other material may to be useful but should not be required to successfully undertake the course. My masters (UK based) was run in such a way.
I generally like such an approach – the notes were of high quality in my program to be sure – but it’s hard to make work in the North American context where adjuncts are doing most of the instruction these days. Unless there is stability in courses taught year over year it’s a little ridiculous to require a sessional instructor to create self-contained notes for a course they’ve only just been assigned (and for relatively little money). So required texts are probably going to continue, and that’s fine, but there ought to be some conditions on their use: a) use texts not authored by the instructor if available, b) if no such work is available the instructor may assign their own text but must not charge for it except on a cost to print basis, and this must go through some sort of department channel that vets the claim of no-substitute / costs charged, or c) if they must charge for it (e.g. publisher sets price) then do their best to negotiate with publish for something (e.g. free PDF use, low-cost e-book, whatever).
I haven’t put much thought into that list so I’m sure it could be improved. But generally speaking the idea is that professors shouldn’t unduly profit on a textbook that they wrote by making it required for a class that they teach. Not because professors shouldn’t make money but because of the moral hazard involved.
One of the many infuriating things about this incident is that we’re all put through mandatory conflict of interest training, *every year*. (As is the case roughly everywhere in the US, I think.) The training is insipid, but it would (arguably) at least be worth something if it dovetailed with actual enforcement of conflict of interest rules.
On the positive side, this story also highlights that we (Univ. of Oregon) have a student newspaper with excellent investigative reporting.
$570,000 divided by $90 per student divided by 4 years equals 1580 students per year. UO has about 20,000 undergraduates, so about 5000 per year. 1580 divided by 5000 is 0.316. Is it really true that over 30% of UO students take “Popular Songwriting”? What am I missing?
Bjs:
I don’t know. In the article it says the course used to have 500 students per term. University of Oregon seems to be on a quarter system with four terms per year, so that’s 2000 students per year. 2000 * 90 * 4 = 720,000, but (a) the course might not be offered all four quarters each year, and (b) perhaps 500 is max enrollment and the news article did say that enrollment varied from year to year. Also, $90 is revenue, but presumably the book costs this guy a couple bucks to print.
In any case, yeah, it sounds like it’s a popular class with something like 1500 students taking it each year.
I applaud your estimation! Looking at the course schedule a bit years, here are some enrollment numbers:
Fall 2018: 288 students
Winter 2019: 307
Spring 2019: 373 students
Fall 2022: 480
Winter 2023: 495
Spring 2023: 499
Yes, these are *gigantic.*
Interestingly:
Fall 2024: 49
Winter 2025: 50
Spring 2025: 50
Even more interesting, these are all online courses, the recent years being asynchronous online courses. (I.e. no “live” engagement with an instructor.) Especially in the age of AI, the majority of these courses are the modern equivalent of medieval papal indulgences. The student pays money and makes little pretense of learning, the instructor makes little pretense of teaching, money changes hands. (This is not a U. Oregon thing, but is ~universal.)
To be fair, I know one person who teaches a rigorous asynch. online course; it takes enormous effort. Perhaps “pop songwriting” is like this, but given the sky-high enrollment, I doubt it.
The available records indicate that MUS 151 was first taught by the instructor during Sp2018, and has been offered every Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall term since then except for Sm2021 when it was canceled (at least until F2024 – the last term for which the search page https://registrar.uoregon.edu/faculty-staff/scheduling/prior-class-schedules offers data).
It has always been offered as a web course, with a total enrollment of 8,914. If $570,000 is about what the instructor made for selling his text, and he kept all of the proceeds, then the average price of the text would be $63.94.
As of F2024, the enrollment cap (‘Max’ below) was reduced to 50 from a typical 500 during non-summer terms.
I wonder how grading was done. I also wonder what the grade distribution was.
I should see if it’s possible to discover how Michael Sandel’s very popular Harvard course on justice (https://pll.harvard.edu/course/justice) has been handled during its long history.
Term,Max,Location,Avail,Net Enroll
F2024,50,AsyncWeb,1,49
Sm2024,40,AsyncWeb,12,28
Sp2024,500,AsyncWeb,1,499
Winter2024,500,AsyncWeb,5,495
F2023,500,AsyncWeb,26,474
Sm2023,40,AsyncWeb,15,25
Sp2023,500,AsyncWeb,27,473
W2023,500,AsyncWeb,20,480
F2022,500,AsyncWeb,9,491
Sm2022,40,-,13,27
Sp2022,500,AsyncWeb,6,494
W2022,500,AsyncWeb,18,482
F2021,500,AsyncWeb,20,480
Sm2021,45,WEB,13,32
Sm2021,-,WEB,-,0
Sm2021,45,WEB,28,17
Sp2021,500,WEB,119,381
W2021,500,WEB,78,422
F2020,500,WEB,25,475
Sm2020,150,WEB,105,45
Sm2020,150,WEB,125,25
Sm2020,150,WEB,128,22
Sp2020,1000,WEB,559,441
W2020,500,WEB,11,489
F2019,500,WEB,21,479
Sm2019,150,WEB,22,128
Sm2019,150,WEB,109,41
Sm2019,150,WEB,115,35
Sp2019,400,WEB,17,383
W2019,320,WEB,13,307
F2018,300,WEB,12,288
Sm2018,130,WEB,78,52
Sm2018,130,WEB,43,87
Sm2018,100,WEB,27,73
Sp2018,200,WEB,5,195
I don’t think there is a 4-year period that totals quite to the number of students we need (6300*90=570,000 and I’m only getting to 5700-ish from this table), but pretty close. Maybe the investigating author got to “4-years” somewhat differently than I did. Whatever.
This still represents over 30% of the student body taking this course. That’s more than “popular”… that’s nuts! Can you take the class more than once? What’s going on in Oregon, is UO the nation’s sole source of solo soul singers?
What in the world is an asynchronous student?
“The professor, Toby Koenigsberg, teaches the “Popular Songwriting” course at UO, which previously had at times several hundred asynchronous students each term. . . .”
Paul:
I’m guessing this means that they watch video lectures–they’re not attending the class “synchronously,” so it can fit any schedule.
Many of my students are asychronous…they do learn, but not when I want them to learn.
I suppose it is obvious that the name of the instructor, Koenigsberg sort of translates to “King & Hill,” the publisher. Unfortunately, “Alper” translates to vain and lazy in Bosque and is thus, limited as a nomme de plume.
I found this interesting:
“Prof reportedly clears a half million bucks by requiring online students to pay $89.99 each for his self-published course notes”
All those “9’s” at the end. Unlike Benford and the leading digit likely being a “1”, the final few digits these days in almost anything is likely to be a bunch of 9’s. Although I am vague on this, I believe this is a relatively new phenomenon.
And, I am wrong. It is called “charm pricing” and dates from the 1870s-1880s and
“was done intentionally to ensure till drawers were opened to give customers change—preventing cashiers from pocketing whole-dollar payments.”
https://www.price2spy.com/blog/charm-pricing/
“The success of charm pricing lies in the psychology of numbers in pricing. Consumers tend to read prices from left to right, a phenomenon known as the “left-digit effect”. When they see a price like $9.99, their brain anchors on the number 9 rather than rounding up to 10, making the item appear more affordable. This pricing psychology influences decision-making, leading to higher sales conversions.”
The thing I’ve always found confusing about academic publishing is that everyone involved claims that it’s barely even profitable. They sell heaps of quite expensive books.
Authors claim they don’t make much per book. Bookshops say they struggle to pay bills. Publishers claim prices are what they are to cover costs.
Now one professor has a go and makes $500k from
one book at one institution.
I live in a university town with two large academic presses, and those I meet who work for them are very well paid and have amazing soft benefits (tons of annual leave, easy to get sabbaticals, very generous parental leave). So I suppose publishers “covering costs” covers quite a lot of things that might not be strictly essential to the core business of publishing. Not to mention of course that covering costs presumably also includes the costs required to make a couple of billion in profit every year (Elsevier apparently made £3.2 billion profit in 2024).
Other, Anon:
I think this can happen in an industry in its final stages, when it is clear that the business model is disappearing so there is less of an incentives for new players to enter the game. Existing players can make huge profits even in view of the dark clouds on the horizon.
An example is local newspapers, which I think had amazing profit margins in the 1990s and the early 2000s, even while journalists were fully aware of the forthcoming collapse of the industry.
One might argue that this also describes our modern industrial economy, which is based on unsustainable levels of growth in resource extraction.
The economics of self-publishing for a captive audience do not at all resemble that of a traditional publisher.
To me, the real scandal here is not that a guy ripped off students; people rip off each other all the time, so we should not be surprised at university professors doing that. What I find scandalous is the lack of accountability. While professors’ lack of accountability is partially rooted in the idea of academic freedom, universities generally engage in cover-ups of misconduct all too often. Ripping off students for a few dollars is not OK, but much worse things have happened and are happening. If the world of academia is learning anything from episodes such as this, I fear it learns rather slowly.
Raphael:
Agreed. Columbia University still does not seem to have fully looked into what happened with the medical school rapist and the fake U.S. News statistics. And these are just the cases we’ve heard about.
And I have a feeling that other institutions (business, police, military, medicine, K-12 education, etc. etc.) are just as bad; universities are just more open so we learn more about their problems.
I have heard of the opposite behavior. Some years ago I heard a credible story about a University of Michigan Computer Science professor who assigned his own textbook but reimbursed students for the value of his royalties from their purchases. Admittedly, this behavior was unusual enough that the story of it spread.
Bob,
I make about $2 from each book they buy. So I just try to give them $2 of extra value in the courses I teach!
To complicate matters, the royalties differ depending on whether the student buys or rents and whether it is an eBook or a physical book. In any case, the royalties are all very small. The remarkable thing about the case here is that the book is self-published, so there is no third party insisting on their (major) cut of the revenues.
I did this! One, maybe two years at UW?
I assigned my surveys book to a postgraduate class and reimbursed (in cash) the students who bought a copy and showed it to me for my estimate of the royalties. And one of my colleagues bought a few boxes of his book (at the author price, without royalties) and resold them at his cost, which comes to much the same thing.
If I were starting off now I might well just have used “Applied Survey Data Analysis” (West, Heeringa, Berglund) and not written a book myself.
I had an econ professors at Michigan in the early aughts who assigned his book for class but gave us $1 if we showed him the receipt as that was how much he got in royalties.
The frustrating part of this is that, at least as far as I can glean from the Daily Emerald’s reporting, there was no investigation, no discipline, no consequences whatsoever for this flagrant violation of university policy and state law. The guy enriched himself for years by scamming his students and gets to keep his cushy tenured job for life. Literally the only thing the university did was revise its textbook policies to explicitly outlaw self-dealing.
Like other commenters, I’ve assigned my books in classes before, and have made PDFs of the assigned chapters available to students for free. Who knew that I could have been running a lucrative side-business all this time!
A collection of random comments. One has to look at local (university-level) details also.
1. Publishers are not generous to authors, but this is true elsewhere in the publishing world as well – including music, and probably video (haven’t dealt with video materials).
2. At one time, publication of a TEXTbook was regarded by committees considering promotion, tenure, and salary increases, as establishing a professor’s reputation as a leader in a discipline and awarded tenure, promotion and pay increases accordingly. This is view is no longer so widely held. Opinions vary on the publication of advanced texts and monographs, but textbook publication is in part motivated by internal rewards. (Some universities actually confiscate part of the profits of such.) Apart from persons who wrote runaway best-seller first/second year textbooks, no one claimed that the student market made them much money.
3. At one time, publishers did a massive amount of work preparing it for publication. Consider the cost of hot-typesetting mathematical equations, diagrams and photos, if you go back far enough, which gated the number of books that publishers accepted.
4. When on-line notes became a ‘thing’, many universities promoted the idea to each and every professor to prepare notes for their students and some administrators even suggested that the textbooks and bookstores were overpriced, and this help the students; teaching awards for example, would consider this, as well as the collegial committees. However, few professors entering this enterprise fully understood the cost of maintaining course materials and found themselves with a St Bernard puppy growing up. Few faculty care to maintain someone else’s course materials. To use a book-seller’s expression, these materials don’t shelf well.
5. Was this case a rip-off of students? Have to look at the specifics. I once (pre PC era) purchased a textbook for what was at the time very expensive, and was a collection of photocopied articles from journals. It erupted into a student newspaper scandal. Prof seemed reasonable, but so did the students. The prof said this saved the students huge amounts of photocopying at the library and students had suggested it, but truth to tell, a lot of tutors and lab demonstrators made DIY spiral-bound or stapled extended notes or exercises.
I realize these comments draw from some different eras. Just pointing out some of the economic, social and perhaps even political forces pulling parties in different ways.
When I last moved office, I filled two good-sized dumpsters with samples from publishers.
I did an analysis at Georgia State University identifying how much students pay for textbooks. There is a similar Business prof who assigns her own “How to use Excel” book for ~$100, teaches around 800 students per semester. I do not know how long she has been doing this, but could well be more than the Oregon prof here.
https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/02/06/how-much-do-students-pay-for-textbooks-at-gsu/
For the folks talking about margins, if you self-publish the margin is basically however much you want it. (Which at GSU, there is a weird small publisher that may well be a scam for profs to profit as much as they want, not sure I cannot buy the book myself.)
An additional problem is making students spend $200 for course bundles from Pearson or whatever. GSU should obviously do bulk licensing when you have 1k+ students buying it per year.