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Originally Posted by wodin
The facts are that just as any other business college texts sell for whatever the market will bear. If a publisher can get $186.19 for Fundamentals of Aerodynamics he most certainly will. And if a student can find the same text on the used market, then he will do that.
In my college days, which admittedly were a very long time ago, professors would frequently supplement their income by authoring and publishing a small run textbook and assigning it to their class. Their clientele usually was limited to their own students, so they might sell a maximum of a few hundred books over a several year run; but when the used book market caught up, that well would run dry. Selling and trading used textbooks was a thriving business in college towns across the country.
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That has less with money to do than "publish or perish". It is a common practice for "mid-level" professors to fill their required quota of publications, when establshed academic publishers reject their manuscripts.