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    10% of net, not gross, and for a paper book, net is half of gross or even less. Also, it is literally easier to write a textbook to use in your course than to choose someone else's and plan the course around it. So why not give it away, you never wrote it for money anway. Commented Jul 8, 2017 at 16:44
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    @KateGregory: Don't know if there's a typo, but the assertion "it is literally easier to write a textbook to use in your course than to choose someone else's and plan the course around it" is very false IME. Commented Jul 8, 2017 at 18:27
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    I've done it. I did it because I was fed up of trying to find a book and the students always hating it. I've written over a dozen books. The effort of working around a flawed textbook is huge. Writing one came very easily to me. Commented Jul 8, 2017 at 18:34
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    Authors need citations -- Yeah, but citations to (computer science) textbooks don't really count.
    – JeffE
    Commented Jul 8, 2017 at 22:51
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    @JeffE Citations, unlike dollars, have no particular universal value. That is you can find promotion committees or even people in charge of hiring that will literally look up your citation count or h-index without considering it any further. A book cited 1000 times will then be worth a lot to you at that particular institution. As a side but related note, many academics fear the day that Google implements a "remove self citations" feature from Google scholar.
    – Simd
    Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 11:59