[gradschool]

Yes, that's a fair point. I was thinking only of journal articles and conference proceedings. One way of making money off textbooks is to be a professor in an institution with a large number of students and make them a requirement for the course. It also helps to make a few small changes every year and call it a new edition, so each year the next class of students has to buy new ones instead of used copies from the previous year's class. I question whether this practice is worth defending.

[SCHiM]

> Yes, that's a fair point. I was thinking only of journal articles and conference proceedings. One way of making money off textbooks is to be a professor in an institution with a large number of students

Yeah that behaviour is detestable. Absolutely utterly unethical and everyone who engages in this type of behaviour should take a long look in the mirror and realize that there's an Evil person looking back.

I've lost so much money to f*ckers like this and I have no recourse, it makes me so mad I can spit.

[MichaelBurge]

The professors don't actually make much money. The publisher takes a huge commission. I've heard 5-10% royalties in some cases. Usually if they use the book for their own course they'll waive even that to avoid having the appearance of a conflict of interest.

They could make a ton of money doing it this way: Physics textbooks can sell for hundreds. But many don't.

Using your own book for a course(separate from the money) has its benefits: The book has exactly the content that you want to teach off of, and you can also choose good problems.

When I took a Differential Geometry course in college, the professor had a translated version of some paper from a Russian mathematician back in the 1950s that he taught off of. It was cheaper to get copies from Kinko's, and it's not like the math changes. The old pioneers can sometimes give better intuition too.