I know in my area of study and also for many of the high end sciences the cost of some textbooks can run easily over $100 each.

$100? Try $200+ for science textbooks. One of my students' microbiology books cost $249 last semester.

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Yeah. I suppose it could lead to more self-publishing of textbooks too, huh?

I'm not sure. Professional editing and layout is really important in a textbook, maybe more important than in publishing for the popular market. For example problem sets had better have a low error rate, graphics and charts in science texts have to be laid out just right.

And there is a what amounts to a self-publishing racket in textbooks now. There are publishers who specialize in publishing very small run text books by professors who will assign them to their own classes. These often sell not for $100 but for $150 and $200. So the book is not officially self-published, but 100% of sales are to students in the school at which the author teaches.

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There are already a lot of (especially science and engineering) textbooks and academic journals available scanned to pdf at filesharing sites. You can ahem Chemistry books! (Not that I, as an academic librarian, could ever recommend this.) If this catches on - and I don't see why it won't - we may see the 'digital music revolution' clusterfuck all over again.

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I had a prof like that in undergrad. Had to buy his books. And then we spent the first class period going through and correcting the errors, mostly typos. Folks got frustrated, and he was like "be thankful, it was cheaper to do it this way than to do a 2nd printing". And the book wasn't all that great either. Clearly, editor was sleeping on the job, if there was one at all.

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The idea of most of our authors self-publishing is laughable. And scary.

There is a lot that goes into a textbook and, more importantly, the supplements.

I work on approx. 1 project per year.

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I have a whole pile of "textbooks" that were bound batches of photocopies sold by one of the textbook stores next to the University. Something like 300 pages of photocopies bound into something that kinda looks like a book, and those would sometimes run as much as $50. I'd much rather get that in PDF format on something like a Kindle.

As it is I'm starting to buy as many of my reference books as possible for my current Kindle. I can actually carry it with me when I get on a plane, the bookshelf full of reference books doesn't do me much good when it is stuck in the office.

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As it is I'm starting to buy as many of my reference books as possible for my current Kindle. I can actually carry it with me when I get on a plane, the bookshelf full of reference books doesn't do me much good when it is stuck in the office.

I'm curious what titles you have in pdf! Would be very interested in that too.

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I have a whole pile of "textbooks" that were bound batches of photocopies sold by one of the textbook stores next to the University. Something like 300 pages of photocopies bound into something that kinda looks like a book, and those would sometimes run as much as $50.

yep, we called those "Kinko's packets". I used them extensively my first two years until Basic Books v. Kinko's ruled that it was copyright infringement.

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I'm curious what titles you have in pdf! Would be very interested in that too.

The latest one is the 3rd edition of John Huntington's Book Control Systems for Live Entertainment, it's actually available in a Kindle edition. Beyond that it's mostly manuals that I download and keep in a folder on my hard drive, and now working on getting onto my server so I can get to it anywhere I have a net connection.

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yep, we called those "Kinko's packets". I used them extensively my first two years until Basic Books v. Kinko's ruled that it was copyright infringement.

Then you just had to buy them through the bookstore so they could pay rights and charge you $150.

Still more useful than 90% of textbooks.

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