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Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks
An anonymous reader writes "Here's the new approach under consideration by college leaders and textbook manufacturers: 'Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).' That may be 'the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy,' proponents claim."
You mean they get paid for doing work? Wow. That's unheard of.
Have you written a textbook? It is LOTS OF HARD WORK! It is way way way more work than teaching from someone's textbook. They are unlikely to get well compensated for their time no matter how much they charge.
Let's do some computation. Suppose large classes of 100 students. Suppose you teach the class let's say once a year (you generally get the same class even less often). So every time you teach it you make $5000. Writing a textbook takes a lot of time. I wrote two reasonably short ones. I would say it's at least a year of at least 2 hours of work per each workday. So let's say 200 days times 2 (conservative estimate). So in one year you've made 500k for 400 hours. That's $12.5 for an hour. Yeah you've spent half your life getting a PhD so that you could make a little bit more than minimum wage.
In five years you could perhaps make $62.5 per hour of the work. Yay! That's all assuming that you teach the class 5 times, it always gets 100 students, and the $50 is pure profit. It's also assuming that you spent no extra time improving or fixing the book.
Most likely if you are at a good college, your wage per hour is still bigger. You are more likely to get a good consulting job for far more money.
Do the math before opening your mouth.