It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down.
At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets.
Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books.
Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.
> Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student.
This is not completely true. I have long avoided using any textbooks the students have to pay to access. The only exception currently is my intermediate macroeconomics class. I have not found a suitable no-cost supplement that covers all the topics of the class. My motivation is that it's easier to teach a class if you can offload certain topics to a reference, and you can't do that unless everyone has access to said reference.
Beyond all that, universities have an incentive to reduce cost as much as possible. Whether university administrators ignore that incentive is left for the reader to determine.
I distinctly remember the author of my Linear Algebra courses textbook was the professor himself. He only assigned homework out of that book and you had to buy the book through his website/preferred publisher. It was not available in print at all so you couldn't even buy it in the bookstore.
The cherry on top, was that his book was chock full of errors. We were constantly receiving emails from the professor letting us know which problems HE HAD ASSIGNED had errors and which numbers to change in his own book, etc. How this is allowed to happen is beyond me and was beyond frustrating for all of us as students.
Worst experience I ever had with a teacher and textbooks.
This wasn't even advanced linear algebra, just the basics. You could literally assign/use any book published in the last 20-30 years and nothing would change about our learning experience. Math doesn't fucking change so often that a new book is needed every 6 months and everybody knows it.
> At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course.
I came to the comments to make this point. I had several professors with massive egos that made you buy their crappy book for their class. I remember on at least a couple of occasions the book wasn't even used!
At the other end of the spectrum, we had professors which used regular tech books for the textbooks and supplemented with lectures as appropriate. I much preferred this approach.
Frankly, the entire US higher education system is a racket and is long overdue for disruption.
In my experience the professor-authored books are not the same story. Professors teach one or two sections and earn a few dollars per book (author share on technical books is small!). Their main optimisation using the book they wrote is reduced preparation time to teach as they know that version inside and out.
Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent, and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when they did occur so you could continue using older versions
These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.
That was my experience, too. Opposing the racket was a reason that a couple of my professors wrote their own textbooks. Only a few did that, but a lot more wrote and distributed their own problem sets so that students could use any edition of the assigned textbook, or even a different textbook if they had one from another school.
Most universities have a policy that if the professor authored a textbook he himself assigns, then he is required to return a comparable proportion of the royalties.
Perhaps he was forcing you to buy brand new so that he didn't overpay the royalties back (i.e. they may have had a simple formula based on the number of students, regardless of whether you bought or not).
Every course like that which allows rating of the course should get negatively reviewed for exactly this reason. It's fine if they want to extort students, but there should be a cost.
At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets.
Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books.
Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.