See? Now we know why. Now if they started giving us more royalties or rights, maybe we’d be keener to see copyright enforced generally…. :-)

(i) a major international law publisher has published a new book for which I wrote two long chapters, using unique expertise and sacrificing the bulk of two family holidays. It is selling for 150 Euros – i personally could never buy a book at that price.

(ii) a major international law publisher asked me to write an 80-word blurb for someone else’s book.

i receive the identical reward in each case: one free copy of the book. (although the booksellers apparently already have their copies of (i); i haven’t received it yet, but i have learned that my name is removed from the cover and the title page, despite having written the bulk of the book). So my name will only appear on the cover of (ii).

It is utterly fascinating that the system should work at all.

I’m co-author of a few books. O’Reilly and Macmillan offer a royalty of 10% (significant editorial assistance and a monetary advance) to 15% (delivered manuscript, no advance) for computing books. Post-sale income is split 50:50. You can negotiate to retain rights for some media, although the question there is if you want to bother (there’s no point retaining 100% of the income for electronic media rights if you never intend to develop an electronic delivery system, you may as well let the publisher do the heavy lifting and take your 50%).

I was disgusted by the poor quality of the computing curriculum in Australian high schools. Altering the curriculum is too hard for computing professionals. Offering a high-quality textbook seemed a better approach. I had a chat with a few educational publishers. Textbooks sell for about the same price as computing books, so I was expecting similar terms. As you’ve seen, this is not the case.

Basically educational publishers want to retain all rights so that they can “update” the book at regular intervals (usually making it look trendier rather than any change of content). The updates are typically done by arts graduate wage slaves, which explains the dumbing-down of science/math/engineering/computing textbooks as the years pass since their initial publication. You can’t update what you don’t understand. As a result there is no competent biology textbook available from the large textbook publishers (if it wasn’t for your note about defamation I’d name the culprits here).

Once the publisher has a new edition they really hassle the schools to buy it, since the school is now teaching from an outdated book. The suggestion being that their students are suffering since they are learning from superceeded content.

There appear to be two ways forward for authors that actually want to produce a good textbook.

Self-publishing. The ICE-EM are taking this approach with their school maths textbooks. The books are excellent work, their only competitor would be the US COMAP textbook (originally self-published, now published by Freeman). It’s interesting that the development of these two fine texts were not sponsored by textbook publishers, but by projects of professional mathematicians.

Internet publishing. There’s yet to be a good textbook written by using wikis/forums and other Internet resources. But there’s a world of material at the next layer down — handouts, teaching plans and the like. My own feeling is that a wiki-like textbook and related forums, etc would be a good approach for the next generation of projects by professional societies which are concerned about the poor quality of teaching of their specialisation.

Cheers, Glen.