As I checked my mailbox before class today, I found a little postcard that made me sad. “Turn your books into bucks,” blared the headline. “Join the thousands of faculty members that are taking advantage of our great services and prices….” The organization offers to provide you with free boxes and packing materials, and cash can be deposited directly into your account. They purchase “complimentary copy” and “free copy” textbooks, too! Such a deal!
Okay, where are these books coming from that this company wants to buy? Textbook publishers provide faculty with desk and review copies for free. This way, you can review a text and decide whether it will work for your students or not. Whether or not you adopt a text, you can still keep the desk copy for reference. Yes, we are often flooded with texts without asking for them, but is it ethical to make money on these? In my view, the answer is no. The ethical solution is to return the desk copies you don’t want back to the publisher.
I can see the students’ need to sell textbooks, but faculty, who are actually rather well paid in spite of many protestations, do not need to be doing this. Faculty who make bucks off desk copies are simply passing one more cost along to the students who purchase the text, as the money needed to send a desk copy has to come from somewhere. Publishers can help by asking faculty if they have time or interest in reviewing a new text before sending one out, and by providing the materials needed to return the book to the publisher.
Note that I’m not giving you the link to the source of my postcard. I don’t want to give them any publicity.
