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Re: [Phys-L] textbook prices



Thanks for the responses to my earlier post on textbook prices.

Regarding self-published textbooks, I agree that there's a lot of poor-quality material out there. That's why I asked for examples that were being used as texts outside the authors' institutions. The list in my blog article (http://dvschroeder.blogspot.com/2015/12/textbook-price-pandemonium.html) includes a good example, the optics text by Peatross and Ware (http://optics.byu.edu/textbook.aspx). I'd encourage anyone who is skeptical of the feasibility of self-publishing to download their text (the electronic version is free) and give it a good look. I don't teach optics myself so I can't really assess the content, but the authors claim that it's being used at universities around the world and it's quite clear that they've paid careful attention to a great many details. The typesetting and artwork are better than in my own commercially published (but self-typeset) thermal physics book.

The spreadsheet linked from the blog article lists a few other examples that are published through Amazon's CreateSpace. One of these is Garcia's computational physics book, which used to be published by Addison-Wesley. The others are original works that were never commercially published. My impression is that quite a few people are using Newman's computational physics text.

One way to promote a book is to put on a related workshop at an AAPT meeting. This practice seems to be rather common for textbook authors who are active in AAPT. In most cases the books are commercially published and this practice has always struck me as a little odd, even though there's usually some sort of pretense that removes the workshop from the book by a very small step. For a self-published text that's available free (or for the cost of printing), I should think the pretense wouldn't even be necessary.

I'd also like to respond to the remark about self-published text materials not being maintained over time. The fact is, this is usually the case for commercially published textbooks as well. As long as a textbook is reasonably polished to begin with, I don't see why it should need frequent maintenance.

I've often wondered whether it would have been better to publish my thermal physics textbook myself, instead of signing over the rights to a commercial publisher. The publisher's main contributions were branding, marketing, and distribution. Without a respected publisher's brand name on the book, it's pretty unlikely that AJP or Physics Today would have reviewed it (we did review one self-published book several years later, when I was AJP book review editor). Whether word would still have gotten around and instructors would eventually have taken the book seriously, I have no idea. But in 1997, when I signed the contract with Addison-Wesley, it was hard to foresee how easy self-publishing would soon become. Even pdf was not yet in widespread use at that time. In any case, I did sign a contract, the book has been far more successful than I ever imagined, and I get a nice royalty check every six months. But I no longer own the rights to my work, it costs twice as much in the U.S. as I think it should, and now Pearson is selling international editions that have been abridged in thoughtless ways that I find horribly embarrassing. So I continue to wonder.