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Here (introductory physics.)

Freshmeat turns up plenty of possibilities, including some standalone apps and some lightweight ones. Self-promotion: I wrote a really tiny, simple one called When.

Shameless self-promotion: this open-source applet lets you figure out which naked-eye planets you're seeing, without having to install software. (Your browser has to support Java.)

My point is that if the text is free (as in freedom), so is the solution guide - ergo, it's of no value to profs who like to assign problems from a text.
What I do with my own physics textbooks is to make the books free (as in speech) and the solutions not free (as in speech). I provide the solutions on a CD to instructors who have adopted the book, and I don't charge them money, but it's under a very strict, proprietary license. Basically all they're allowed to do is hand out solution sets on paper to their students. (There's also an answer checker online, which students can use to see if they got the right answers. There are also some problems with complete worked solutions in the back of the book.)

Unfortunately, however, of the five books I reviewed here, I don't really feel that any of them make good prospects for adoption. Keisler is, IMO, a very cool book, but it's not copylefted, which means it's likely to evaporate off the web as soon as the author either loses interest in maintaining his web site, or dies. Nobody is going to adopt a book that's a pig in a poke like that. And there's currently no way to correct an error or update the book, both for legal reasons and because the author himself doesn't have it in editable form on a computer.

I think both of the copylefted ones are pretty good books over all, but for the reasons given in my reviews, I don't think either one is really going to get adopted widely. I did talk to Garrett by e-mail, and he expressed an interest in fleshing out his book a little (and fixing the licensing problem), if people showed interest.

Note that the author of the review is also the author of the Light and Matter books. Very cool guy. Erm, okay. I have a rather odd definition of "cool," but what he's doing could become very important.

Here are some links I dredged up last time this subject rolled through.

Wiki Textbooks
Light and Matter: Open physics textbooks.
An open math textbook
Project Gutenberg, for all the English majors out there.

There are also a lot of books out there which are freely downloadable, but not modifiable. Has anyone here used a free (in either sense) textbook as their primary learning tool in a college class? If so, what was your experience?

It's Protestants who claim evolution is a lie, and the Earth is 6,000 years old. Catholics believe that evolution and the Big Bang are the most likely explanations for why we are here, they accept that Genesis is a metaphor.

OK, let's assume it's #2, and you really think your book has something special to say, and your main goal is to get it to some readers without losing an arm and a leg. Then I'd suggest simply putting the PDF online and bypassing the whole print publishing thing. If you do a good job promoting your web site, you may reach 100-1000 readers a year, and you'll do it without losing your shirt.

The reason self-publishing has worked for me is that I am able to reach physics professors through the web and inexpensive print advertising in trade journals. Basically I try to get them to come to my site and download the PDFs to see if they like them. All it takes is one professor who likes them, and then I get a wholesale order for 20 or 200 books. I hired a printer, paid him a bunch of money, and filled my closets with books. I'd recommend against the vanity publishers; they take a really hefty chunk of your money. Although my method has worked for me, it's been capital-intensive --- right now I have about $10,000 worth of inventory in my house. (For tax purposes, you're supposed to account for inventory at the price you paid for it.)

Although people often state the principles of relativity using the word "light," e.g., describing c as the speed of light, actually relativity is about space and time, not electromagnetic radiation. The factor c is better understood as a kind of space-to-time conversion factor. Even if light didn't exist, special relativity would be the same theory; you could then describe c as the speed of X, where X is any massless particle other than the photon.

Theology, aka string theory. Sorry, but any theory which literally cannot be experimentally tested at any realistic energy level isn't a theory at all. It's an article of faith.
I agree that string theory has been oversold, and that it's in danger of becoming theological. However, quantum gravity doesn't have to be entirely voodoo. For one thing, there was this big experiment called the Big Bang, which probed the right conditions to test theories of quantum gravity such as string theory. A really cool book is Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin; I like it because it focuses on the basic principles that are relatively independent of which approach you use.

As the classroom becomes more digital, I predict we'll see a strong move to "courseware" as opposed to simple digital versions of textbooks. One reason (among many) is that courseware is easy to do in the form of "software as service" and thus has little worry about unauthorized copying. But some people are doing courseware that may be freely copied and reused. Check out MIT OpenCourseWare and the Rice Connexions Repository.

Also, why not collaborative creation of textbooks using a Wikipedia model?

eBay doesn't actually enforce those rules normally, especially if nobody complains. For instance, they theoretically have a rule against selling anything on CD-ROM. Some guy took my copylefted books, deleted the license and copyright page from each book, and started selling a CD-ROM containing my books. (It would have been OK for him to sell them, but it was a license violation to remove the license.) When I complained, they deleted his auctions, but he's still in business selling stuff like LOTR screensavers, porn screensavers, non-copylefted books, etc. -- all on CD-ROM. I filed reports on all that stuff, but they don't actually enforce this kind of rule or pull the auctions unless the victim is the one who files the report.

...does it use nice fonts (can't remember at the moment which are Type 1 and which are Type 3)?
Pdftex automatically generates output that looks good in Acrobat Reader, whereas the tex->dvi->pdf method by default generates those horrible-looking bitmaps.

Can it easily handle both raster images (probably in PNG) and more importantly vector image formats (of which I've currently only used postscript/eps)?
Yes. It handles PNG just fine, but since you're concerned about size, you might want to convert those to JPG. For vector graphics, you just need to convert your EPS files to PDF, using the epstopdf script that comes with the latex distribution. Those PDFs then get embedded in the big PDF by pdftex.

I can't remember if the specific problem was using embedded EPS images, which I see from the pdflatex website that pdflatex cannot handle
Not an issue. Just convert to PDF.

About your tight space requirements again: you may find by experiment that some pictures give a smaller PDF if you convert your line art to JPG, while others are more compact if you leave them as vector graphics.

Pdftex doesn't play nicely with old versions of Acrobar Reader, so make sure to warn your readers to use AR 5.0 or later. (It generates PDFs that meet Adobe's spec for earlier versions of AR, but there are bugs in the earlier versions that cause them to garble certain things.) Don't know if this applies to the tex->dvi->pdf method.

...does it use nice fonts (can't remember at the moment which are Type 1 and which are Type 3)?
Pdftex automatically generates output that looks good in Acrobat Reader, whereas the tex->dvi->pdf method by default generates those horrible-looking bitmaps.

Can it easily handle both raster images (probably in PNG) and more importantly vector image formats (of which I've currently only used postscript/eps)?
Yes. It handles PNG just fine, but since you're concerned about size, you might want to convert those to JPG. For vector graphics, you just need to convert your EPS files to PDF, using the epstopdf script that comes with the latex distribution. Those PDFs then get embedded in the big PDF by pdftex.

I can't remember if the specific problem was using embedded EPS images, which I see from the pdflatex website that pdflatex cannot handle
Not an issue. Just convert to PDF.

About your tight space requirements again: you may find by experiment that some pictures give a smaller PDF if you convert your line art to JPG, while others are more compact if you leave them as vector graphics.

Pdftex doesn't play nicely with old versions of Acrobar Reader, so make sure to warn your readers to use AR 5.0 or later. (It generates PDFs that meet Adobe's spec for earlier versions of AR, but there are bugs in the earlier versions that cause them to garble certain things.) Don't know if this applies to the tex->dvi->pdf method.

...does it use nice fonts (can't remember at the moment which are Type 1 and which are Type 3)?
Pdftex automatically generates output that looks good in Acrobat Reader, whereas the tex->dvi->pdf method by default generates those horrible-looking bitmaps.

Can it easily handle both raster images (probably in PNG) and more importantly vector image formats (of which I've currently only used postscript/eps)?
Yes. It handles PNG just fine, but since you're concerned about size, you might want to convert those to JPG. For vector graphics, you just need to convert your EPS files to PDF, using the epstopdf script that comes with the latex distribution. Those PDFs then get embedded in the big PDF by pdftex.

I can't remember if the specific problem was using embedded EPS images, which I see from the pdflatex website that pdflatex cannot handle
Not an issue. Just convert to PDF.

About your tight space requirements again: you may find by experiment that some pictures give a smaller PDF if you convert your line art to JPG, while others are more compact if you leave them as vector graphics.

Pdftex doesn't play nicely with old versions of Acrobar Reader, so make sure to warn your readers to use AR 5.0 or later. (It generates PDFs that meet Adobe's spec for earlier versions of AR, but there are bugs in the earlier versions that cause them to garble certain things.) Don't know if this applies to the tex->dvi->pdf method.

leaving ten thousands of Free Software developers in the legal lurch
The license is still valid. What were you expecting Dave Wiley to do for you that he won't be doing for you now? He's not a lawyer, and he never promised you any legal services.

for example by developing a license which would simultaneously be "Open Publication License v2.0" and "Creative Commons License foo"
You can do this yourself. It's called dual licensing. Lots of software projects are dual licensed, e.g., with the GPL and a BSD-style license. You don't need Dave Wiley's permission to do this. Your readers just have to decide which license they're agreeing to when they download your stuff.

My own books are aimed at the college level, but I do have some high school sales, too. However, I'll probably never sell any to high schools in states like California or Texas, which have centralized textbook adoption procedures -- that gets very political, and you need a serious sales force.

As Thud457 so kindly pointed out, this is freshman physics. It should be in your physics texbook (if you don't have one, get one! or download this ). Basically, L=I*w , where L is the angular momentum, I is the moment of inertia, and w is the angular velocity. What does this mean? Well, if you want to see some serious precession etc., you want to have a high angular momentum. So spin something fast with lots of mass far from the center. Take a look at this: precession . I always found that bicycle wheels worked great - the only hard part is holding on to them, so I would suggest mounting the axle to something. For additional fun spin it up with a drill or small motor. Keep your duty factor low or you'll burn out the motor - drill motors are meant to spin fast, not slow.

I just checked out that textbook I linked to, and the angular momentum section suXors. Perhaps I ought to do an "Ask Slashdot" on Open Source Textbooks. Or would that be a dupe? I searched and didn't find NEthing covering physics textbooks. Hmm.

Good luck with your projects. I looked at your website and it looks like you are a true techie geek. Consider your hand shaken. Try not to catch fire.

What I mean by that is that for many books with complicated layouts (including my own free books), it's simply not possible to reflow the text automatically. Consider an illustrated science textbook, which is the kind of work I do. There's a lot of hand-tweaking involved in getting everything laid out on the pages in the best possible way. And my books' layouts aren't even that complex compared to a lot of the big commercial textbooks out there. Some slashdotters may have used LaTeX to write academic papers, so they'll know how LaTeX tries hard to flow the text correctly, but ultimately it doesn't always do what you want, and either you or the publisher ends up doing more tweaking.

The solution isn't that complicated: if a publisher wants a book to make an electronic book available in both a a typographically rich version and an adaptable version, they can create both a PDF version and an HTML version. Of course, this is really an answer to a question that the publishers never asked. Most publishers don't want open formats, because open formats won't allow them to continue to steal away the rights of end-users, such as the right of first sale.

Everyone in academia uses LaTeX and PostScript
Care to document this?

LaTeX is quite common in math, physics, and computer science. It is not at all common in most academic fields.

Assuming you really meant math, physics, and computer science, it's not true that PS is more common in those fields than PDF. For instance, you can submit papers to the arxiv.org preprint server in LaTeX, and they'll then automatically generate both PDF and PS for people who want to read your paper.

BTW, I hope you're not under the impression that it's impossible to make PDF files without proprietary software. Here's a counterexample, done with LaTeX.

What'll be interesting is when consumer-conglomerates pop up (akin to SETI@home or Folding@home or spamkillers@home) to sell excess processing cycles from home computers... There's many more of us around than there are resources at HP...
Here is my proposal for doing that, and dealing with the spam problem at the same time.

I really hated PDFs until I got off windows/acroread and started using xpdf. why is it 8.6MB?? xpdf source tarball is <500k.
You're comparing a statically linked binary with one that uses shared libraries.

Most of the action in the world of free music is people making old, public-domain sheet music available on the web, sort of like Project Gutenberg does for books. Here is a relevant Open Directory category. (Just so you don't think I'm a total whiner, here is some PD music I've transcribed myself.)

I think the ultimate problem here is that not only does the internet allow anonymity, it virtually requires it. If we had a real working public-key infrastructure, then it would be easy to get rid of spam with forged headers, and block repeated spams from the same spammer. The lack of any such widely-accepted infrastructure means that spammers can spawn as many fake identities as they want.

It's a well known fact about online communities that anonymity encourages abuse. If in doubt, try reading the comments on this story with your moderation threshold set at -1. Why do people post AC on Slashdot? Well, most of the time it's because they want to act like jerks, and don't want anyone to know who they are. The only way to get people to behave well is to make sure their actions will affect their reputation within some community, or at least affect the opinion of the one person they're trying to communicate with.

The danger is that if the bearded-hacker set doesn't get a public-key infrastructure off the ground, we'll end up with .NET instead as a de facto standard. How would you like an internet where you couldn't send e-mail without having a .NET account? It's also important to make sure that anonymity is never forbidden, just discouraged -- but that distinction is probably not an obvious one to most corporations and governments.

The problem is that the open-source community is better at copying than inventing, and better at creating tools than at making them easy to use. Tools like GPG are just much much much too hard to use. They're written by people who have read Cryptonomicon one too many times. The average user just needs a little guidance in how to pick a passphrase that's resistant to dictionary attacks -- they do not need to be warned that GPG is running in insecure memory. There have also been some good proposals for sender-risks-paying systems for getting rid of spam. (Here's mine.) But now we run into the problem that the open-source community doesn't do a good job at innovation. It's relatively easy to organize hackers to build software that's supposed to use known, defined, public protocols to do things that everyone knows they want to do. It's much harder to build something novel from scratch.

Outcompeting him on eBay is indeed an excellent idea. I don't want to put a lot of energy into it myself, since I'm basically in the wholesale printed book business. (I do sell CDs from my own site, but it's not something I'm working on very hard.) However, there's a guy named Jason Czekalski who is interested in doing, in a legal and ethical way, what the other guy is doing in a sleazy way. Jason is the one who originally contacted me to let me know about the license-violating guy on eBay. Maybe we'll see Jason's white-hat CD going mano-a-mano on eBay soon against the black-hat guy!

B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified
Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the
Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five),
unless they release you from this requirement.

Any publication in standard (paper) book form shall require the citation
of the original publisher and author. The publisher and author's names
shall appear on all outer surfaces of the book. On all outer surfaces of
the book the original publisher's name shall be as large as the title of
the work and cited as possessive with respect to the title.

Sorry for the double reply, but I had another thought. It would be interesting to see what his reaction was if a Slashdotter contacted him to ask a question about one of the auctions, e.g. item 3516263544, which violates the license on my books. For example, "Who is the author?" "Is the book available for free on the web?" "Hey, did you know you were violating the author's copyleft license?"

I can't believe someone posted an Ask /. question without a link to their work! As a home-schooling parent, I'd be delighted to have access to free textbooks. Where are they?
I didn't want it to come off as a plug for my own stuff, or a ploy for publicity, but anyway, here it is. Thanks for asking! See my sig for more sources of free books.

The idea of invariant sections is a very reasonable one. For instance, if I write a book with a dedication to Martin Luther King, I don't want someone else to come along and release a version where it appears that I've dedicated it to Adolf Hitler. Duh!

We don't live in a free-information utopia, and we don't even know what such a utopia would be like (although I'm pretty sure that in my utopia people won't be able to pull the King-to-Hitler switcheroo). So let's deal with reality. Maybe some of the people engaging in this silly debate should spend some time writing some documentation instead of arguing over licensing. This kind of over-zealous ideological navel-gazing is really pathetic.

The idea of invariant sections is a very reasonable one. For instance, if I write a book with a dedication to Martin Luther King, I don't want someone else to come along and release a version where it appears that I've dedicated it to Adolf Hitler. Duh!

We don't live in a free-information utopia, and we don't even know what such a utopia would be like (although I'm pretty sure that in my utopia people won't be able to pull the King-to-Hitler switcheroo). So let's deal with reality. Maybe some of the people engaging in this silly debate should spend some time writing some documentation instead of arguing over licensing. This kind of over-zealous ideological navel-gazing is really pathetic.

If the goal is to allow access to both the student and her parents, I think it gets a little more complicated. They'd really have to have two separate passwords for accessing the same account. Otherwise the student just changes the password and doesn't tell the parents.

Actually, the feature high school teachers have asked me for is the ability to print custom-formatted report cards. I don't think most school districts are that technologically sophisticated, nor are many parents, so the assumption is that it has to go home on paper. My software allows reports to be printed out, but there's no provision for customization. If anyone's interested in adding such a feature, please let me know! I think the right way to do it is to use the facilities in a word-processor (OpenOffice?) for creating forms and filling in the blanks.

If the goal is to allow access to both the student and her parents, I think it gets a little more complicated. They'd really have to have two separate passwords for accessing the same account. Otherwise the student just changes the password and doesn't tell the parents.

Actually, the feature high school teachers have asked me for is the ability to print custom-formatted report cards. I don't think most school districts are that technologically sophisticated, nor are many parents, so the assumption is that it has to go home on paper. My software allows reports to be printed out, but there's no provision for customization. If anyone's interested in adding such a feature, please let me know! I think the right way to do it is to use the facilities in a word-processor (OpenOffice?) for creating forms and filling in the blanks.

Another possibility is to use a certain feature of Apache, which lets you throttle bandwidth. For example, you can set up Apache so that any file greater than 3 Mb in size is only served up at a bandwidth like that of a modem. This might discourage some looky-lous who have fast connections and would otherwise just download the book, say "wow, it really is free," and then put it in the recycle bin.

See my sig for more examples from other authors and in other fields. Green Tea Press sells open-source CS books, and I think some of their sales are to high schools.

I wrote an article about free books that used Stallman as the personification of a certain approach to free information, based mainly on the portrayal of him in the biography Free As In Freedom. Well, the article never even referred to the biography directly, but after it appeared on Slashdot, I got an e-mail from Stallman saying that my article showed some misconceptions about him, his work, and his ideas. He said it sounded like I might have gotten some of those mistaken impressions from Free As In Freedom. We exchanged one or two more messages, but I never did really find out from him exactly what he thought was so inaccurate in Free As In Freedom. I think part of it was that he didn't like having himself characterized, both in the biography and in my article, as Mr. Cathedral, versus Eric Raymond as Mr. Bazaar. But I think there must have been more to it than that.

For instance, I have a textual "home" link on every page that takes you to the site's home page. It also happens that I have made the graphical banner on my pages into a clickable link that will also take you to my home page. A blind person doesn't need to worry that there are two methods for getting to the home page -- there's one method that can be read aloud with speech-to-text software.

On the other hand, there may be other things on my site that really are accessibility issues. The problem is, I can't tell from Cynthia's output what they are.

It seems to me that the real need is for actual humans with disabilities to test web sites. Yes, I know that's expecting them to do something that they really shouldn't have to do, but I just don't think there's any alternative.

I've been contacted once by a blind person who was having trouble using my site. The problem, however, was with my PDF files, not with my HTML. Bobby and Cynthia don't check PDF. And in fact, it wasn't something that I was able to solve, due to the realities of the way I created the PDFs.

Adobe could decide to change the format
This is the same as the situation with PostScript, which Unix users have never balked at. In any case, the real issue is whether the author provides the book in a format that can be edited with free software. For instance, this book is available in both LaTeX and PDF formats. For 99.99999% of all users, the PDF is going to work just fine. But in case something terrible happens with PDF, the LaTeX is still there. It's just like the distinction between source and object files for programs. MS could redefine their .exe format tomorrow, but who cares? Any open-source app that runs on Windows can just be recompiled.

There are other open, editable source formats as well, e.g., DocBook, XSL-FO, and the one being developed by Oasis.

You should keep in mind, however, that the economics of publishing have changed, and are going to keep on changing. Although print on demand still hasn't really become viable, technology now makes it much more practical to print small numbers of books. My first press run was 250, and now I'm doing printings of 1000. Because these numbers are small, the financial burden of paying for printing really isn't such a crushing one. Yes, if my sales grew by another order of magnitude, then we'd be talking big bucks --- but please bite me with that problem!

Promotion? Well, doing promotion the traditional way is indeed extremely expensive. You have to hire salespeople. In my market (college textbooks), you have to send out free review copies to professors. But promotion no longer has to be that expensive. Basically I just try to drive traffic to my web site, where teachers who are interested download the book. This costs me peanuts in webhosting costs. I do a little bit of advertising in a trade magazine (The Physics Teacher), but it's still not that expensive. Of course, if you want people to beat a path to your door, your mousetrap does have to be better, not worse...

If the publish are unnecessary and are just middlemen, then go around them, for christssake, and create a better system.
Yep, that's what a lot of authors are doing now.

The article is correct about the necessity for filtering. However, he makes some strange assumptions about how filtering can happen. He only offers two options: traditional filtering (filtering by the publisher before distribution) or some kind of vaguely imagined bayesian filtering.

What makes more sense, IMO, is that content should get filtered, but after distribution, by readers. To see an example of how that can work, see my sig.

The article is correct about the necessity for filtering. However, he makes some strange assumptions about how filtering can happen. He only offers two options: traditional filtering (filtering by the publisher before distribution) or some kind of vaguely imagined bayesian filtering.

What makes more sense, IMO, is that content should get filtered, but after distribution, by readers. To see an example of how that can work, see my sig.

Here is a list of all the publishers I know of that are involved in print-publishing free books. If anyone knows of more, let me know!

Now what's really going to be cool is Mars's opposition coming up in August, which is going to be the closest in thousands of years.

I have a little planetarium applet that lets you play around and look at this kind of stuff.

well, as a font designer, I have very high standards for music fonts :), except for feta the only thing I think looks good the most Finale "Engraver" style font. (IIRC). For example, most fonts get the half-notehead wrong; that should be diamond shaped, not elliptical.

I just went to Coda's website to see if I could see some examples of Finale output in PDF or whatever, and all I could find was a bunch of things [codamusic.com] that call for "the SmartMusic Viewer plug-in", which obviously I can't use. I guess it's the same idea as Sibelius's Scorch plugin, which I can't use either. Scorch uses the same file format as Sibelius proper, I believe; any idea whether these Finale SmartMusic files are the same format as the ETF files that Lilypond can import?

Don't know about the smartmusic files (send me one, and I'll have a look), but I guess it's not ETF. For PDF, head over to CPDL or www.lightandmatter.org. Most freely available finale stuff hasn't been layouted by professional engravers, which is why they usually look sucky.

You can try the excellent series of free books Light and Matter. It's an excellent overview of elementary physics.

Note: The "Simple Nature" textbook on the same site covers the same material as "Light And Matter" with a little more depth added. So it might be the choice of many slashdotters.

The main exception I'm aware of is overpriced college textbooks. For example, my own free textbook is aimed at a market (introductory physics without calculus) where the standard price is $120. The price of do-it-yourself printing is more like $60, and it's no coincidence that if you buy a [rinted copy of my 6-volume set from me, the price adds up to a little more than $60.

Newtonian Physics

If you are looking for an on-line physics course covering the basics, with a free on-line PDF textbook, check out Light and Matter. This course starts out at square 1, describing what science and physics are, moving on to what a "measurement" is, why mathematics are useful for physics, then starts with Newtonian physics, continues through optics and electromagnetism, and to quantum mechanics.

The site also contains some astronomy texts, physics Java applets. This is an excellent site for anyone teaching physics.

You can find free introductory physics books at www.lightandmatter.com They are downloadable as pdfs.

Some of my friends and relatives thought I was insane to give away my physics textbook for free on the web and also self-publish it in dead tree format. Well, having it on the web has been a great sales technique. I just filled an order from a school district in Kentucky for 1000 books, and the only reason they found out about the book was via the web site. As with Baen, my prices are set so that you really can't produce it any cheaper yourself, even if you're satisfied with an unbound stack of single-sided computer output. Well, that's 90% true. I did have one guy at a university in India who decided to produce the book himself rather than buying printed copies wholesale from me. Apparently the local cost of photocopying is low enough that it actually does make sense for him to do this, especially considering how high the shipping costs would have been.

O'Reilly offers quite a few books for free on the web because they're out of print.

For a book that's in print, I don't think it's appropriate to pay the authors extra for copylefting it, because making the book free in digital form is actually a wonderful sales tool. It's worked for me, and it's also worked for Baen books.

For a book that's out of print, I also don't think it makes sense. The reason these O'Reilly books are out of print is that they weren't big sellers. If they're not making a profit on the book, there's no reason to pay the author extra. Of course I assume O'Reilly only makes the books free online with the author's consent.