How do schools choose textbooks

Hi,

I'm thinking of getting into the online textbooks market. I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge about how professors/teachers/districts choose what textbooks they will use?
How much do they usually spend per purchase or per year?


Also, what strategies or marketing do textbook authors use to get schools to use their books? Do they just "write and pray" that their book will get noticed but instructors?

Thanks.

I have no idea about most of your question, but I'm guessing they send out a lot of free copies to the people who do the decision making. In a college setting, that is usually the professor.

Hmm. That seems like a very inefficient and expensive strategy.

Not really, I expect that a vast majority of the costs of a textbook go into R&D, writing and editing; the actual printing of the book is probably pretty small compared to that, so it doesn't cost much to produce additional copies.

Textbooks companies don't make much money by selling individual textbooks to the professors, their money comes from selling textbooks to all of the students in the class once the professor decides to use a particular book, so giving away one book isn't bad if it could potentially lead to dozens or hundreds of sales.

Plus it's pretty hard for a professor to see how well a book matches up with their lesson plans or course objectives unless they are able to read the actual book.

Of the ~50 courses I took in college, fully half used a book written by the professor. A quarter of them used materials you could get at amazon or the book store, like O'Reilly books for programming courses. Agree with this. That's why review copies of games, books, CDs, and everything else are so cheap. It costs $200,000,000 to make spider-man, and $0.89 to print a copy and mail it to the New York Times.

At the lower levels (primary school through high school), many states simply use whatever Texas or California uses. Texas and California write up the facts they want in the books, and a single textbook maker delivers a book that matches those criteria. The book is already created, so other states take advantage of the lower price and buy that. That's why it's such a big deal every time Texas tries to remove basic sciences from textbooks. I went to school in Texas for 8 years, and I used nothing but Scholastic brand books (I think, it's been a while).

I agree with Dan about how the lower level schools choose their books. They choose whatever Texas or California chooses.

The sickening thing is that Texas chooses whatever books appeal the most to a bunch of nuts for whom reality (in the form of critical thinking) is of no consequence.

In other words, they push their personal agenda, and eff it if our kids continue to fall behind the rest of the world in actual, real, useful knowledge.

It's very, very important to realize that the earth and the universe are only 5-10 thousand years old. Evidence to the contrary was manufactured and artificially aged for the single purpose of fooling those with independent minds. It's worked wonderfully.

Exactly! And aliens built the pyramids, before flying back to live with God on his home planet, as Romney says.

Wei, you'll like these. I own a few.

Those shirts are hilarious!