&gt;&gt; let&#x27;s not forget about the chaos of the educational publishing industry and the insane price points they command for modestly updated editions each year.)<p>I had a friend of mine who I knew when I was working at Thomson Reuters back when they still had their educational publishing wing of the company. He was in sales and said educational publishing is one of the biggest rackets nobody has heard of.<p>He said he would do his due diligence and meet with professors and educators regularly during the year and let them know what the publishers were doing, but in the end, he said it was always a 50&#x2F;50 roll of the dice if a professor or school bought the books he had been pitching them since they got the last version of the textbooks they ordered.<p>He said it mainly came down to name recognition, and Thomson had that - but he also said it was similar to how agents woe professional athletes. Lots of perks, free dinners and baseball tickets to the professors making the decisions. He said as a sales person, they had a &quot;client account&quot; card where they could wine and dine clients and had a monthly stipend between 5K-10K specifically for this purpose.<p>He said you&#x27;d be surprised how greedy these professors get once they know they can influence what books are going to be purchased for the following year and from what company.