Why academics should self publish textbooks

I have self-published my two textbooks, Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python, and Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python. I have written about my set up previously, long story short use Quarto to compile the books to epub and a nice PDF, and then use LuLu for print on demand. I figured a blog post on why I think all academics should take this route when publishing textbooks is in order though. Reason #1 – you can set the cost. Most textbooks are ridiculously overpriced. My two books I sell at print prices of $50 and $60. These are textbooks that are over 200 pages in a larger letter paper size. If they were the smaller size, they would be 400+ pages, and priced for print well over $100 (and possibly over $200). The actual print costs for each of my books are around $20 and $30 (and then $6 to $10 for shipping). And of course selling the epub is basically zero cost. Many professors write their own textbooks because they teach a course that…