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"Sit down and work out the maths" is really just code for "here's one I prepared earlier". If you're keen on this sort of thing, read a bit about solving systems of linear equations, and you will hopefully be able to look at the problem, exclaim "this is trivial!" and live forever happy in the knowledge that it is indeed theoretically soluble (as I tried to describe above) without having to concern ones self with the computational subtleties that suck all of the fun out of it.

MIT OCW have a set of videos on linear algebra if your curiosity is sufficient to justify chewing up some time on it. Probably some of the most useful partially-post-high-school maths that one can learn. Here is a free textbook on it.

One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.

Totally untrue. See my sig for a catalog of free books. Many of these are of very high quality. Here are a few examples:

1. Hefferon, Linear Algebra, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html
2. Keisler, Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html
3. Judson, Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, http://abstract.ups.edu/
4. Thide, Electromagnetic Field Theory, http://www.plasma.uu.se/CED/Book/

Those are just the first few that came to mind.

Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.)

I teach physics, not math, but here are some existing math books that I consider to be of pretty high quality:

1. Hefferon, Linear Algebra, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/ (BY-SA license)
2. Judson, Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, http://abstract.ups.edu/ (GFDL license)
3. Corral, Trigonometry, http://mecmath.net/trig/ (GFDL license)
4. Keisler, Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html (CC-BY-NC-SA license)
5. Illowsky and Dean, Collaborative Statistics, http://cnx.org/content/col10522/latest/ (CC-BY license)

The lack of color in the printed versions of free books is never going to change. The cost of producing a book in color is high enough that no significant number of students will ever choose it voluntarily over a free digital book. This may become less relevant as more and more students start carrying a tablet or a laptop in their backpacks.

Proofreading, error checking, and increasing the number of exercises are all things that could definitely benefit from a wider collaborative effort, and I don't think they require government funding as proposed by Steinberg. E.g., my own physics texts are free, and I've benefited a lot over the years from having people send me emails pointing out errors. I do have a few exercises from other people's physics books that are under compatible licenses, but not very many.

High quality art would definitely be a huge plus for free textbooks. My wife paid a couple of people to do art for her free French textbook, but in general, illustrations are an area where government funding really might make a huge difference.

You want to know why there aren't any "open source" maths textbooks?

That would be news to all the authors of open-source math books: http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html

I hope more math departments start picking up on this trend:

http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html

Anon because I've already moderated several times in this story thread.

MIT OpenCourseWare (That's their silly capitalization, don't blame me.)

Wired story about Flat World Knowledge, a company that provides free online and cheap printed copies of college texts that sells study aids and practice quizzes to support the business. Online browsing is free, PDF is about $20, and printed books cost about $60 or less if the pricing I read about is still current.

Wikibooks has books of several levels.

Here's a list of open books for undergraduate mathematics as recommended by Robert Beezer at University of Puget Sound

US House Bill 4575 is an attempt to authorize government grants to publishers of open-source college texts, as widespread affordable education is seen as good thing for the country as a whole. There's also a Senate version.

There's a consortium for Open Educational Resources among community colleges. They have lists of many titles under many categories. There's still a lot of work to be done, but some of the books have been peer-reviewed and they clearly mark which ones those are.

LibrarianChick links to all sorts of books and all sorts of sites that links to all sorts of other books. Some of these are texts, but there's also reference, fiction, tutorials, and more. Several of the linked works are university-level. There are also links to non-books, like search engines, research results pages at places like Harvard, and open online encyclopedias other than Wikipedia.

Textbooks Free is a fairly ugly site with beautiful content: links to textbooks by subject, links to other open textbook projects, and even an Amazon affiliate link so when you buy what non-open books you want you can support open textbooks. They also have links to open course materials like audio and video lectures. Their links include material from MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of California at Irvine, Tufts, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Bookboon has ad-supported free textbooks. For those of you who won't get too distracted from studies by the ads, I think that's not a bad model. These are free but not open and you have to give them your email address to download the books.

Free Book Centre has links to lots of open and public domain texts. They are mostly CS, engineering, and mathematics but they have some medical books too. There are some books linked that are free-but-closed, and some of those are only free for non-commercial use or only in electronic format (sometimes only by browsing the book on the author's web site without even saving a local copy). Some of the links are currently broken, too. Overall, it's a pretty useful site if you're looking for CS/math/EE/medical materials. One additional note of caution: at least one "book" is just a detailed ToC for a book by someone else, some "books" are just sample chapters for closed books for sale, a few are lecture notes for specific courses collected but not necessarily edited into textbook form, and there are a handful that seem to be pirated copies of commercial books from the likes of O'Reilly. You have been warned.

Creative Commons has a tag for news items about open textbooks to help us k

There's a few projects like that. As far as I know, they aren't really in widespread use.

A professor of mine once said that if you really want to know the material you should try writing a textbook on it. He was in the middle of writing various textbooks on Group Theory and Abstract Algebra. I think that's good advice for any expert in any field.

Here are some links I found after a quick google search:

California Open Source Textbook Project

Textbook Revolution

Open Textbook Repository

An open source Linear Algebra Textbook

A list of open source Math textbooks

Hope this helps!

There's a few projects like that. As far as I know, they aren't really in widespread use.

A professor of mine once said that if you really want to know the material you should try writing a textbook on it. He was in the middle of writing various textbooks on Group Theory and Abstract Algebra. I think that's good advice for any expert in any field.

Here are some links I found after a quick google search:

California Open Source Textbook Project

Textbook Revolution

Open Textbook Repository

An open source Linear Algebra Textbook

A list of open source Math textbooks

Hope this helps!

It is fast. It's so fast that it can screw up spectacularly faster than I can make it stop. I must admit that nothing gets your message across faster than an all flash index page.

Unfortunately, that message is "we're sorry, but our message is all hype and no substance. We were afraid you might figure that out if we didn't guide you firmly through our message with no opportunity to look behind the curtain, or for that matter, to think about what we're saying and realize that it adds up to nothing at all. On the bright side, since you block flash by default, at least we know you're the sort of "critical thinker" who we can never win over with gibberish.

I'm not saying flash is all bad, it seems to have it's place in the world (though it needs to be replaced with an equivalent that actually works on all platforms). I block it by default, but do have it installed for the few cases where it actually makes sense.

Too often, flash is resorted to to get around the apparent fact that MS has a whole division that does nothing but come up with the oddest and most brain damaged possible interpretation of a standard and makes sure that's what gets implemented. Their motto: "Those weirdnix guys are rank amateurs"

Well... There is one school that may have an issue with using that color...

http://www.ups.edu/

Whales are mammals.

Take a look at this picture. You can very clearly see the neck, shoulder blades, and even most of the parts a human arm/hand has in it.

Sam

Free collaborative wiki style textbooks for the third world would be great. There are also already a few free textbooks available available on the Internet such as these:

• Discover Physics
• The Modern Revolution in Physics
• Newtonian Physics
• Lessons In Electric Circuits Volumes I - VI
• A First Course in Linear Algebra
• First Year Calculus

Perhaps we ultimately could end up with some textbooks done collaborative Wiki style and other free text books done in a different way. Either way I think free textbooks would be great especially for common slow changing subjects such algebra, calculus, English, history and such.