I used to write my own textbooks in the form of extensive notes and problem sets and put them online for my students, free of charge. The University insisted that I list a departmental approved text in the syllabus, which I did, but told students it was optional. I told them that if they did buy it, which I recommended for reference and another view, to get an older edition for pennies on the dollar. It really cut down on exam and homework cheating too because my problems could not be found solved online.
Ted, I'm a fan of yours and really appreciate what you do and how you do it. It's inspiring. And thanks for mentioning my Listening to Jazz text with Oxford in this article. I just want to mention a couple things that I think are important in this context. First, I agree with your overall point, and this is certainly something I think about a lot on a few levels, and I'm also trying to figure out how to write about the issue myself. In fact, I just told an academic press editor I don't think I'm going to fulfill a contract that involves this topic because of many of the issues you mention, and others. But in terms of pricing, there is a little left out of your article that I think is worth chiming in with - I hope you don't mind, and not as a way to compare our books or their value - they are quite different. My royalties aren't bad at this point, but not great either (which is fine, since like most musicians I have always done many things within music to make a living), but I can see the numbers of what sells. Very few schools are buying the hard copy and most sales are of the ebook. I use the ebook in my teaching at this point (in-person and online) and have found it quite effective for my teaching, particularly considering so much teaching is now online (my online courses at John Jay College fill instantly and get great student feedback as well as educational results I'm proud of). It rents for under $50. But the most important part of that fits in with other issues, and some you have written about very thoughtfully - basically the problems within the music business and the areas of artists' rights and copyright issues, including the fact that people now think music should be free. My ebook (and the hardcopy) come along with paid-for licenses for most of the music (as opposed to relying on a streaming service, for example), licensed videos, and licensed photos. This costs money, and also remunerates the artists in a professional manner (yes I know big corporations dominate, but that's another discussion). If you added the cost of your book and two CDs, that's more than what mine rents for (I wish it wasn't rental!) and they get a book, licensed streaming recordings (way more than two CDs worth), photos, and videos, and the ebook actually works quite well at this point (and I hope you know I'm not trying to compare our books or encourage sales - I think yours is great). But I think that's an important point. Without that, in a listening focused semester-long course, students are forced to rely on streaming services (which often doesn't have the correct version) or an instructor provides illegal mp3s on something like Blackboard (you and I know they do this, and I used to do it), which are not lessons a music professor should be passing on to students - it's ok to not buy music and it's ok to steal it. So even though I agree with your points here, I think my book has excellent value, treats creators and rights holders well, and am proud of it as a product and believe it is fairly priced in the electronic format. The hardcopy price, however, is not something my students can afford. Just another angle that I thought was worth mentioning. I have many other thoughts in this area as I'm sure you do, including academic journals, but this is your substack, not mine. ;) It would be fun to talk about our various thoughts on this very broad topic. Thanks for the thoughtful article. Ben Bierman
Since 2020 I've been wondering if the death wish applies to the whole Western culture. Our traditional authority figures - government, academia, news media, science, medicine - so much of what they do now just doesn't make sense. They work against their own best interests. They seem to go out of their way to create conflict. They can't even lie intelligently. It's really quite fascinating if you can stay detached. Good article.
As someone who used to work in academic publishing - I won't say which publisher but it was a large multinational one - I was astonished by how target driven commissioning books was. Editors - who usually had no background or even interest in the academic subjects they were commissioning books on - would work overtime to ensure that they met their annual signing and publishing targets, and so naturally the focus is very much quantity over quality. I recall one textbook I supervised which was ostensibly about AI imagining in medicine which had entire chapters devoted to vedic meditation and other wildly off topic subjects. If I had not have intervened the book could have easily have been produced and no one would have noticed, or even cared.
The other surprising element was how lackadaisical the peer review process was for book proposals. Just two moderately favourable responses to a proposal was deemed good enough to greenlight a book for publication.
The same company also completely botched the announcement for a corporate restructure, when many of us were informed we were at risk of redundancy in the middle of an inappropriately upbeat 'webinar', but that's another story...
I taught a history of jazz course at McGill University in 2021 and chose to use your text because it was so much cheaper than anything comparable. I could never force students to pay over $100 for a music appreciation text. Thanks as always for what you do.
Outstanding article -- all true! Gouging the libraries is an old habit, just like raising parking prices. Universities (and their presses) need to think about the future and stop living in the glory days of unlimited students and lots of dollars floating around.
As one who was involved in numerous meetings and committees through the Music Library Association in my past career, and one who is currently a director of library access this article really hits home. I can tell you the ridiculous prices you have quoted are a real challenge to maintain copyright and CONTU and keep faculty from going rogue. You would think that if we all used a little common sense, the prices would be set for all of us, from author to library, to make an honest living, but then I think back to the financial crisis of 2008 and Alan Greenspan and his comment prior to the crisis ....that of course banks would never be too greedy, it would topple the system.
Let me at least brag about the covers of my books. MIT Press and Routledge care about the cover if the author does. I provided photos (paying a fee in 2 cases) and they did great design work:
I contributed a chapter for one of the overly expensive books that you highlighted. When the book came out and the price announced I wasn’t really surprised having spent much time in academia, but I was embarrassed. As an author I have been encouraged to help promote the book. It is a large volume, but still... and for my work spanning over a couple of years my compensation is one copy of the book.
I'd add that much academic writing has become completely impenetrable to the general public. The only audience they are writing to is other academics in their field- not the kind of audience you need advertising/reviews to reach.
Commenting on the issue of textbooks: I teach at a community college and we’ve been making a concerted effort to move away from traditional textbooks for a few years now. The issue is their exorbitant cost. I and many other professors now use open-access textbooks and/or articles available through our library’s online subscriptions (JSTOR, for example). The simple truth is that if class materials are too expensive or difficult to access, students will not buy them and will try to find answers on sites like CourseHero instead.
The central problem is not something as enigmatic as a "death wish," it's a question of WHO dies.
That's because the "leadership" of so many corporations is staffed by "prosti-toads," whores who screw things up–and rebrand when they're unable to figure out what the problems really are. Because they're not the ones who die, they just move on to the next "position." (Imagine what Freud would have done with that word here.)
Show me a publisher that has people who actually know anything about books–and love them–such an outfit would be rare as hen's teeth.
As in "The Music Man," ya gotta know the territory, and today's "managers" simply don't. Businesses imagine that their hires have "Profound Knowledge" as Deming would say, because they've been steeped in statistical analysis, and "principles" of commodity-style marketing.
I sat next to folks on airplanes so many times who regaled me with stories of how they built a business, then sold it, and bought it back when the "generic" marketing geniuses who took over ran it into the ground. And the original owner typically built it back . . .
Hey! Everything ain't sausage. Ya still need to know the territory . . .
I used to write my own textbooks in the form of extensive notes and problem sets and put them online for my students, free of charge. The University insisted that I list a departmental approved text in the syllabus, which I did, but told students it was optional. I told them that if they did buy it, which I recommended for reference and another view, to get an older edition for pennies on the dollar. It really cut down on exam and homework cheating too because my problems could not be found solved online.
Ted, I'm a fan of yours and really appreciate what you do and how you do it. It's inspiring. And thanks for mentioning my Listening to Jazz text with Oxford in this article. I just want to mention a couple things that I think are important in this context. First, I agree with your overall point, and this is certainly something I think about a lot on a few levels, and I'm also trying to figure out how to write about the issue myself. In fact, I just told an academic press editor I don't think I'm going to fulfill a contract that involves this topic because of many of the issues you mention, and others. But in terms of pricing, there is a little left out of your article that I think is worth chiming in with - I hope you don't mind, and not as a way to compare our books or their value - they are quite different. My royalties aren't bad at this point, but not great either (which is fine, since like most musicians I have always done many things within music to make a living), but I can see the numbers of what sells. Very few schools are buying the hard copy and most sales are of the ebook. I use the ebook in my teaching at this point (in-person and online) and have found it quite effective for my teaching, particularly considering so much teaching is now online (my online courses at John Jay College fill instantly and get great student feedback as well as educational results I'm proud of). It rents for under $50. But the most important part of that fits in with other issues, and some you have written about very thoughtfully - basically the problems within the music business and the areas of artists' rights and copyright issues, including the fact that people now think music should be free. My ebook (and the hardcopy) come along with paid-for licenses for most of the music (as opposed to relying on a streaming service, for example), licensed videos, and licensed photos. This costs money, and also remunerates the artists in a professional manner (yes I know big corporations dominate, but that's another discussion). If you added the cost of your book and two CDs, that's more than what mine rents for (I wish it wasn't rental!) and they get a book, licensed streaming recordings (way more than two CDs worth), photos, and videos, and the ebook actually works quite well at this point (and I hope you know I'm not trying to compare our books or encourage sales - I think yours is great). But I think that's an important point. Without that, in a listening focused semester-long course, students are forced to rely on streaming services (which often doesn't have the correct version) or an instructor provides illegal mp3s on something like Blackboard (you and I know they do this, and I used to do it), which are not lessons a music professor should be passing on to students - it's ok to not buy music and it's ok to steal it. So even though I agree with your points here, I think my book has excellent value, treats creators and rights holders well, and am proud of it as a product and believe it is fairly priced in the electronic format. The hardcopy price, however, is not something my students can afford. Just another angle that I thought was worth mentioning. I have many other thoughts in this area as I'm sure you do, including academic journals, but this is your substack, not mine. ;) It would be fun to talk about our various thoughts on this very broad topic. Thanks for the thoughtful article. Ben Bierman
Since 2020 I've been wondering if the death wish applies to the whole Western culture. Our traditional authority figures - government, academia, news media, science, medicine - so much of what they do now just doesn't make sense. They work against their own best interests. They seem to go out of their way to create conflict. They can't even lie intelligently. It's really quite fascinating if you can stay detached. Good article.
As someone who used to work in academic publishing - I won't say which publisher but it was a large multinational one - I was astonished by how target driven commissioning books was. Editors - who usually had no background or even interest in the academic subjects they were commissioning books on - would work overtime to ensure that they met their annual signing and publishing targets, and so naturally the focus is very much quantity over quality. I recall one textbook I supervised which was ostensibly about AI imagining in medicine which had entire chapters devoted to vedic meditation and other wildly off topic subjects. If I had not have intervened the book could have easily have been produced and no one would have noticed, or even cared.
The other surprising element was how lackadaisical the peer review process was for book proposals. Just two moderately favourable responses to a proposal was deemed good enough to greenlight a book for publication.
The same company also completely botched the announcement for a corporate restructure, when many of us were informed we were at risk of redundancy in the middle of an inappropriately upbeat 'webinar', but that's another story...
As a former college professor, it pained me to see the students pay so much money for such crap.
I taught a history of jazz course at McGill University in 2021 and chose to use your text because it was so much cheaper than anything comparable. I could never force students to pay over $100 for a music appreciation text. Thanks as always for what you do.
Superb overview, Ted, supported by commendable research. These things so need saying!
Great work - but fix the Henry VIII date!
Outstanding article -- all true! Gouging the libraries is an old habit, just like raising parking prices. Universities (and their presses) need to think about the future and stop living in the glory days of unlimited students and lots of dollars floating around.
As one who was involved in numerous meetings and committees through the Music Library Association in my past career, and one who is currently a director of library access this article really hits home. I can tell you the ridiculous prices you have quoted are a real challenge to maintain copyright and CONTU and keep faculty from going rogue. You would think that if we all used a little common sense, the prices would be set for all of us, from author to library, to make an honest living, but then I think back to the financial crisis of 2008 and Alan Greenspan and his comment prior to the crisis ....that of course banks would never be too greedy, it would topple the system.
Let me at least brag about the covers of my books. MIT Press and Routledge care about the cover if the author does. I provided photos (paying a fee in 2 cases) and they did great design work:
Wittgenstein in Exile (MIT Press): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525909/wittgenstein-in-exile/
Wittgenstein's Artillery (MIT Press): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045834/wittgensteins-artillery/
Tractatus in Context (Routledge): https://www.routledge.com/Tractatus-in-Context-The-Essential-Background-for-Appreciating-Wittgensteins/Klagge/p/book/9780367465568
And they have offered affordable editions.
I contributed a chapter for one of the overly expensive books that you highlighted. When the book came out and the price announced I wasn’t really surprised having spent much time in academia, but I was embarrassed. As an author I have been encouraged to help promote the book. It is a large volume, but still... and for my work spanning over a couple of years my compensation is one copy of the book.
I'd add that much academic writing has become completely impenetrable to the general public. The only audience they are writing to is other academics in their field- not the kind of audience you need advertising/reviews to reach.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/feds-arrest-russians-accused-of-running-the-largest-pirated-ebook-library/
Commenting on the issue of textbooks: I teach at a community college and we’ve been making a concerted effort to move away from traditional textbooks for a few years now. The issue is their exorbitant cost. I and many other professors now use open-access textbooks and/or articles available through our library’s online subscriptions (JSTOR, for example). The simple truth is that if class materials are too expensive or difficult to access, students will not buy them and will try to find answers on sites like CourseHero instead.
The central problem is not something as enigmatic as a "death wish," it's a question of WHO dies.
That's because the "leadership" of so many corporations is staffed by "prosti-toads," whores who screw things up–and rebrand when they're unable to figure out what the problems really are. Because they're not the ones who die, they just move on to the next "position." (Imagine what Freud would have done with that word here.)
Show me a publisher that has people who actually know anything about books–and love them–such an outfit would be rare as hen's teeth.
As in "The Music Man," ya gotta know the territory, and today's "managers" simply don't. Businesses imagine that their hires have "Profound Knowledge" as Deming would say, because they've been steeped in statistical analysis, and "principles" of commodity-style marketing.
I sat next to folks on airplanes so many times who regaled me with stories of how they built a business, then sold it, and bought it back when the "generic" marketing geniuses who took over ran it into the ground. And the original owner typically built it back . . .
Hey! Everything ain't sausage. Ya still need to know the territory . . .