Companion tickets - a sad sight

[Bobcat99]

I took one class where the "textbook" was actually a series of essays and studies that the professor got permission to reprint. You bought the book at ProCopy instead of the bookstore. And it still cost like $50 for all the royalties and printing and binding.

Do you know how long it takes to write a textbook? Especially a first edition? First the professor has to sit down and write 400 or 500 pages. If they need one, they also have to write a problem workbook and answer key. Then they have to write a lecturer's edition with extra information in it. Then they have to source everything that isn't their own material. Then they have to have it peer reviewed and maybe even tested by a real live class to make sure it's accurate. Then it has to be reviewed by a book editor so it actually makes sense. THEN it get published. It's a lot harder than just writing a novel, and the authors deserve to be compensated well because they're not going to sell a million copies of it and they probably don't get anything out of the used-book sales.

The authors of textbooks get little to no compensation for writing them. They are all part of maintaining a job at a top research university or earning tenure at one. Ask a USF professor who wrote a book one day how much they make from it. You'll be shocked.

[South_Florida_Flip]

I'm not surprised that students would do this, but to be so brazen and idiotic to do it to those waiting in line takes the cake. Maybe issuing the companion tickets on Game Day at the stadium is the only way to combat this. It may result in people waiting to get into the stadium, but it would eliminate scalping.

[Jamie]

The authors of textbooks get little to no compensation for writing them. They are all part of maintaining a job at a top research university or earning tenure at one. Ask a USF professor who wrote a book one day how much they make from it. You'll be shocked.

Then where does all the money go? Do they get research money or grants from the publisher or something? I find it hard to believe that student textbooks would have an 80% profit margin. Otherwise everyone would sell them and there wouldn't be a formal used-book market.

[cal]

Do away with companion tickets altogether.

Enforce line times (2pm, not camping).

Stop cutting and wait or leave.

[Bobcat99]

The authors of textbooks get little to no compensation for writing them. They are all part of maintaining a job at a top research university or earning tenure at one. Ask a USF professor who wrote a book one day how much they make from it. You'll be shocked.

Then where does all the money go? Do they get research money or grants from the publisher or something? I find it hard to believe that student textbooks would have an 80% profit margin. Otherwise everyone would sell them and there wouldn't be a formal used-book market.

You are a professor at a Research I university, like USF.

To earn tenure you have to write a book. To keep your job/get promoted (yes, tenure is not permanent, you must maintain a research assignment, even as a full professor-- there is a formal compensation policy for research assignments, but that comes from the university, not the publishing company) you have to write a book every few years. Some professors do this by updating their text every two years. This is how you end up with 16 editions of a speech textbook when public speaking theory has changed very little in the past 2000 years.

This also works in the favor of the book publisher, who gets to sell a new edition frequently and eliminate the used-book market. Book publishers take the vast majority of the profits in textbooks, and most publishing companies (and there really are only a handful) have been around for hundreds of years.

It's a pretty ugly situation, and it's why I'm more fond of the coursepack approach, though I've found students fresh out of high school really struggle with reading academic-level work.