I was reading a speech that someone wrote for high school students. The author says a number of interesting things but one in particular struck me. He said that the best experts are not the ones who write textbooks. And in general he is write. Some of the best book on subjects are written by experts but textbooks are different. Something else that his comments suggest is that not only are textbooks not written by the best experts but they are not written by the best writers. I fear he is right there as well.
Now in the interests of full disclosure. I have written and published two text books myself. One on Visual Basic 6.0 and one on Visual Basic .NET. I like to think I did a pretty good job with them too. I am not the world's great expert on Visual Basic nor am I the world's greatest writer. I like to think I'm pretty good though.  But I digress.
University professors get promoted and achieve tenure based on writing research articles. At least in the sciences writing text books can actually do a professor more harm than good as far as their career is concerned. Universities think they are in the business of research first and teaching second. OK not all universities but the big name schools seem to be this way. Sure they talk about education but if you look at what professors are rewarded on it is not generally teaching. This worries me.
Sure university research is important. But the job of the university is to teach. This is not the middle ages or even the 18th century where there was little research outside the university. Today there are many more venues for people to actually do interesting research. The university needs to train researchers but it also needs to train the rest of the population so that they can take better advantage of what researchers come up with. To me this implies that the great experts and the great writers must get together with the great teachers to write textbooks. But that is not going to happen until universities start rewarding faculty for creating teaching tools like great textbooks.