academia is not as shiny as it sometimes seems, but it can be great. You can have a lot of freedom to do what you like, work when you like, how you like... do meaningful things. Not always, but the chance is there
it's not to get rich. Selling expensive textbooks is rookie level exploitation compared to what people do in the industry, and most of the profit doesn't even go to the prof
The book to read for this is "the professor is in". The author takes quite a cynical perspective about academia, but in many ways it's true. Worth a read (and probably you can get it for cheap second hand)
They basically wrote their own textbook through class assignments, students are co-authors, seems to work great in their case. At least that's how he presents it.
I'm still a bit unsure how to handle that in my own classes. There are not always suitable OERs or the ones you find come with licensing issues (CC-NC and afaik it's not clear if you can use them because I do teach for the money).
At some point you realize that many of the classic books are just... really good books! The terrible part is what they do to them in literature class. But many of those old books have become classics for a reason.
There was a theory somewhere that this is about power play. If you produce Spiderman 245, power shifts away from the director and towards the production company. Less artistic freedom, more money management. If you let the director create their own movie, they are mostly in charge of how things go, movies become more artistic and less focused on money (alone).
I have nothing to confirm this and don't remember the source I have that from except "the internet"
We can argue as much as we want about whether moore's law covers technological development in general or be pedantic like good old fundamental Christians and only read what the words say.
The bigger problem is that we have reached the era of what we could tentatively call "wal s'eroom". Thanks to enshittification (another one of those slippery words!) I predict that technological progress reverses from now on by 50% every 2 years.
She's a fascist politician herself if you were wondering