Confuzius wrote:How do you know this is happening? Are the teachers or students contacting you, or are you just guessing? I have never heard of a teacher making copies like this, public school, unless the students live in the ghetto and cannot afford 7.99...and if that is the case, they are not going to be learning Mandarin.
You really don't know anything about public schools in the US, do you? Students do not purchase their own books. The books are provided by the school district. And how do I know? Because I have sales figures, which show overwhelmingly single-copy sales, and I talk to people who say how much they like the book and how much their classes like it, and how they are using it with their classes. You can't use a reader with a class in the ways that are being described unless they each have a copy. It's pretty simple.
With the rise of technology and ease of copying, if you really do think this phenomenon is making you earn literally HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS of times less than you ought to (lets say, 50 teachers make 30 copies each...a year...) then I would say you need to find a different way to spread your work (more online subscription based materials). A 100 p book that goes for 7.99 is quite a steal, I will give you that.
Problem is that schools are generally not allowed to purchase that sort of materials. The channels through which schools are "allowed" to purchase are very limited. I've lost sales to date because many schools cannot purchase anything off the Internet -- it has to come from an approved vendor. I'll give you an example -- when I was in a local public school as a teacher, I located a source of little mp3 players. They had such a small capacity that no one wanted them for music, so they were selling for $2.99 each. I had an allowance of about $150 for materials and stuff for my classes, so I put in for 30 of them so I could make listening stations and kids could read along with texts while listening. No go. I was given a copy of the approved catalog and told to buy the mp3 player on page whatever, which cost $16.99 each. No way I could get a class set, but that didn't matter -- the source was approved.
Dealing with schools and teachers is a different world. I realize most people don't know about it until they experience it for themselves, but please don't assume that you DO know all about it. These days in the US, everything related to education has to be cleared through someone who generally has nothing to do with what you're teaching. Sometimes you're lucky if that person is even a teacher of any description, or ever has been. It's not about what's practical, it's about what fits "the rules" so that the community will believe the people in charge are doing a "good job" of promoting education and controlling teachers. (But that is a different debate, though a very lively one these days in the US.)
