@bstacey @vickysteeves @bgcarlisle
Ever since I was assigned Kenneth Waltz's Theories of Intl Politics in grad school, which is 100 pages for $80 (I relied on second-hand notes and photocopies instead), my approach has been to avoid textbooks whenever possible, sometimes creating my own intro materials.

Unfortunately, this approach doesn't scale outside the handful of topics I teach. I think it's costing textbook publishers about £20k a year for my classes.

@mplouffe @vickysteeves @bgcarlisle I taught graduate-level statistical physics over the spring, and as it happened, the book chosen by my predecessor --- which I think is a good one --- wasn't really suitable for the course. It presumes more background knowledge than many of the students had, and it often doesn't spell out the intermediate steps that they'd benefit from seeing. Fine book, not matched to the audience. So, I started writing my own. I had a fair amount of material already that I could repurpose, so it wasn't completely a job from scratch.

I wish somebody would pay me for even just a semester to do nothing but write an introductory textbook for something that all physics undergrads typically take. Sadly, I don't know of any funding agencies that would give that proposal the time of day.

@bstacey @vickysteeves @bgcarlisle
I've run into the same sort of problem finding a suitable econometrics text for a graduate trade-policy class. I think I'm less advanced than you when it comes to creating something new, but I think the only way this will ever get finished is from teaching the class a ton of times.