I just sent an email to students currently enrolled in Modern American Autobiography, my Fall class, in which I offered each of them five dollars. You see, I am teaching my book in September, and the last thing I want to do is make money off the backs of my students in this way. I believe that, as an investment in the future, tuition has great value, and so I have no problem defending those fees, money that pays a percentage of my salary. But I would never want anyone to accuse me of trying to "top up" by choosing my own book for my class.
For as long as I can remember, professors have been sensitive about this issue. When, twenty years ago, I took Elliott Leyton's class at Memorial University, he carefully calculated for us how he earned the cost of a takeaway pizza by having us buy his Hunting Humans. He left us an open offer of a slice, if we wanted one. Dr. Leyton was quite fortunate that his book was, by that time, in a mass-market paperback. So many academic books, marked to pay for themselves through library purchases, are priced beyond what is reasonable for us to require them of our students.
So why do we write them?
This is, of course, a complex and fascinating topic, discussed recently on a number of academic blogs. The short answer is that we must, for professional advancement. But, in my case, I wrote a book that I hoped my students would be able to use. I had an interest, and I designed a class around it. Finding no single book on the topic, I wrote one. It seems to me reasonable, now, after all that time and effort, to use it for the purpose it was intended. For this reason, I am providing the five dollars to demonstrate that my motivations are wholly academic. But, really, they would have to be. No one writes an academic book to make money. Though I am grateful that my publisher, the wonderful University of Iowa Press, has reasonably priced books, I get nothing near five dollars for every book I sell.
It is just a lot easier to hand out a fin than to hand out a slice of pizza.
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