Several TAA members have written against the sale of used textbooks. Used book sales, they argue, drive up prices by forcing publishers into rapid revision cycles, and by forcing them to add new material. What's more, authors get no royalties from used book sales.

I have to say, I'm suspicious of claims that used book sales drive up textbook prices. I find it hard to believe publishers would cut prices if there were no secondary market.

Academics exist in a world where much of our work is offered for publication for free. Publishing in journals doesn't pay anything, and most academic publishers are little better. Even association newsletters rarely pay.

We accept this because spreading knowledge is our foremost aim. But our priorities are misplaced: we don't expect to be paid for information disseminated among our peers, but we expect to be paid handsomely for information disseminated to our students.

As an author, I know how much work goes into our academic work, and I believe our work has value. But royalties are not the only, or even the most important, reason I write and publish. Our top priority as academics must necessarily be the furthering of our students' education.

Along with tuition, living expenses, and the opportunity cost of attending college rather than working, the cost of textbooks are a major barrier to education for students. Many of my students are already struggling to get by, often with families to support, and often alongside full-time jobs. For those students, the money they save by buying texts used might well mean the difference between getting an education and dropping out.

My students and I can do without the fancy 4-color images, the third-rate PowerPoint slides and licensed video clips on the instructor's CD-ROM, the poorly researched and minimally valuable test-bank questions, and the badly organized online content.

What we could use is an affordable textbook that would make the sale of used books irrelevant -- something students could afford new and maybe even wanted to keep at semester's end. My students are all too happy to sell back their boring, bulky textbooks, even for a fraction of what they paid -- to suggest, as a TAA writer did recently, that students should value their textbooks as lifelong references shows an almost painful unawareness of both students' lives and the nature of the textbooks themselves.

It's time to hold publishers accountable for producing more affordable and interesting material -- and if our students are going to be subsidizing the cost of supplementary material, publishers owe it to those students to make that material more valuable, too.

Royalties are nice, but we need to keep sight of our students -- especially our poorest students who are the ones hardest hit by college costs. We should be thrilled that these students are able to find ways to attend and remain in school at all -- and we should be thinking of how we can make our work available to even more students like them.