Ian Ayres recently posted about returning to his students the royalties on his book that he assigned to them.
This has caused me trouble: one of my students read it and asked why I don’t do that as well for my little book, Economics Is Everywhere. I have done this before, when I assigned my labor economics text to a class of 35 students, but not in her class.
The reason I don’t now, I told her, is transactions costs. With 550 freshmen, there is no way to determine which students have bought the book or to hand out the money efficiently. Instead, I make a donation to the university about equal to the royalties earned from my class. My guilt is assuaged and my very scarce lecture time is not disrupted. But if the transactions costs (and my class) were smaller, giving the money back to the students would be a Pareto improvement: the students would be better off. (Hat tip: R.W.)
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Wouldn’t it be easiest to just publish it online with a Creative Commons license? Or are you only concerned with not profiting from your own students?
Joel, how does giving students higher grades really help if they’ve done nothing to earn them?
Text books are expensive, and I haven’t seen one yet that was worth it. Sure , my chemistry book from 35 yrs ago was a good book, but its the same content as those published today, maybe even better. That’s true for many texts. Let’s use the same book more than once and over time everyone wins.
PS, if you really wanted to, you could easily come up with a simple way to credit buyers of new books.
You could host a party for the students at the end of the year, spending an amount equal to the rebate.
I believe that Jonathan’s suggestion is the most polite, most productive, and makes the point to the students in a way that they will remember.
Pedagologically speaking, the lessons might be best served if the students puzzled through much of what is in this thread of comments, first.
Then feed them. Students remember “free food.”
Guys at my high school used to keep all the royalties they received for the textbooks they authored all the time, even if they were using the book in the class. It was no big deal.
I mean, really. You wrote the book, right? You’re teaching the class, right? If you think someone else wrote a better book, then you should either (a) use that book and apologize (to someone) for writing your book, (b) use your book and not apologize, or (c) find another way to make a living.
Make up your mind. Are you qualified, or not?
@Conor from Ireland: US students often pay 2-3 times what students from the rest of the world pay for the same exact book, same edition, sometimes even the same pagination.
That’s why the first place I look when I’m assigned a new text is Amazon to see if some re-seller has the International edition. I don’t care if the book says it shouldn’t be sold in the US. One marketing text I had warned that the International edition had a more global spread of case studies. But when I compared it with another student’s US edition, there were no discernible differences. Same cases, same chapters, same everything.
Also, remember that there is no free market when it comes to textbooks. I have absolutely no choice in what to buy. I cannot say that, since Professor X’s economics textbook is better, I’m going to use that for the class instead of assigned Professor Y’s inferior text. If that’s the case, then I suck it up and buy Prof. Y’s book, but if I really want to understand the material, I’ll buy a used copy of Prof X’s book. That may be intellectually optimal, but it far from economically so. That was how I made it through my undergraduate statistics class. By the time I took it in grad school at another university, the text was much better.
What about signing the book for each student in a particular place? This seems like a win-win as it ensures that you’ll only pay for a book once, and if anything benefits the student making the copy of the book more valuable.