Cal Tech Prof R. Preston McAfee is looking out for the little guys, by which I mean to say, he’s keeping textbook expenditures low for his students by providing a free online edition of a textbook that he wrote and a print copy for only $11. Money is important to the man, as he is a professor of economics, and he believes that expensive textbooks don’t warrant their prices, since they mostly are only costly because of unnecessary pictures.

In a recent interview with On The Media, he said:

I think it’s pretty well known that the business of professors is the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and I'm no exception. I do a fair amount of research, which I then, like almost every professor in America, give away free.

Here, I felt that I could have a bigger impact creating a textbook than in writing more academic papers to be published in ivory tower sort of journals. So I looked at this as being what will give the largest impact for me and for Caltech, who pays my salary.

And I actually, before embarking on the project, went and talked to the person in charge of social sciences and said this is my thinking. Do you agree? And the answer was, absolutely.

I don’t quite know what McAfee means when he mentions giving away his research for free. There are in fact people funding his research, and he does actually make money from publishing his findings. And of course by assigning his own textbook, McAfee does, actually, profit more than if he assigned someone else’s book, even if the other person’s book cost $200. So maybe his decision to assign the text is not entirely free of ulterior motives, but it sure is a good deal.