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Free MIT Engineering Text For Download
An anonymous reader writes " The (sci-tech) Library Question is reporting, "The third edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook, written by John H Lienhard V (MIT) and John H Lienhard IV (U Houston), has been made available on the web. The book is an introduction to heat transfer, geared towards engineering students. It may be downloaded free of charge. The authors explain:
We are placing a mechanical engineering textbook into an electronic format for worldwide, no-charge distribution. The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away. Two potential benefits should accrue from doing this. First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle). Second, free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce."
The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away.
How would you like to explore the possibilities of placing your credit card number online?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is a great initiative. It promotes the idea that we should look at the real value in education. The real value is in the people students get to work with (eg. the authors), and the personal experiences they go through on the way to graduate. Why should publishers make profits in this process when they don't add value?
I think it'd be something nice to put a LOT more of college textbooks online, maybe just provide it as a free service to a university's students or something
It cost almost $600 last time I bought books, anything is still something,
Error 407 - No creative sig found
...but engineers laugh at us for reading O'Reilly's books.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is a very good idea; it would be nice not to have to pay $500+ a semester for books. I am concerned that if this catches on, that a company would find a way to profit from the online books, bringing the college students back into the same situation that they're currently in, which is paying out the ass for basicly renting books for a semester (assuming the college has a book buy back program).
Another thing, will schools then start supplying laptops or tablet PC's to view these text books on while in class?
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
With some engineering and science -related courses suffering from low levels of interest, a wider availability of resources could (as the article suggests) draw out those who aren't applying for financial reasons, whilst giving others a taste of subjects and their potential uses in picking a career path and making a difference. After all, most people have felt they've had a good idea or two at some time or other... many have been discouraged only by the lack of readily available background knowledge.
Yay for more open learning!
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Schools and other educational institutions would probably welcome this as well as it saves storage space, and most importantly, financial resources which can be used in other areas where the money would be of better use such as upgrading technology which is a critical factor. There is nothing worse than having equipment and resources which are outdated and obsolete.
Also, one of the big issues in textbook publication is that the information included sometimes can be determined by what state publishes the text - this is especially true in history and biology, both of which are full of political dynamite.
Maybe eventually this will lead to a freer exchange of information.
...at least they have let their motives and approach be known in a transparanet fashion. More power to them. Certainly there are trade-offs in doing this, but depending on what you are seeking to achieve (read: a profit-motive, a vetting/review motive, an exposure motive related to vanity rather than review, etc) you could gain quite a bit from this.
Here (introductory physics.)
As a college student, I can certainly appreciate the benefits of free textbooks, lord knows the bookstore overcharged by several limbs. The question is not whether or not this would benefits students and the community at large, but instead one of costs versus benefits.
Writing a textbook is no small endeavor, professors often spend months upon months writing and revising a single text. While the Open Source community can survive off the valiant efforts of thousands of coders worldwide, the number of individuals in higher academia qualified to write textbooks is much more limited.
I just can't envision a scenario where this kind of approach is sustainable in a long-term or wide-reaching context. Thoughts?
-- Frag00
Here's something to ponder. Why does somebody write a textbook? Is it because they enjoy the subject matter, enjoy writing, and want to write an engaging, accurate book? Or is it because one can charge large sums for such a textbook? Unfortunately it's often the latter.
While the idea of an epic "Commercial vs. Open" textbook rivalry akin to that seen in software is romantic, writing a textbook tends to be somewhat less pleasant, less rewarding, more expensive, and more exacting than writing software. I'd hate to think the foremost experts in fields may be discouraged from writing one day because they can't compete with free, mediocre sources.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
Free textbooks sounds like a nice idea, but I have to wonder if quality will suffer as a result. There is going to be great pressure from student groups to use free textbooks, even if there are better textbooks available. Since the vast majority of authors can't afford to give away their work for free, this will inevitably reduce the competition between textbooks.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I have started to collect a survey of free eBooks, which contains links to free tech eBooks as well as fiction eBooks (and free AudioBooks).
I applaud the authors for their attitude and their willingness to make this textbook available for free download. However, I think that they may be over-estimating the value of a good textbook.
Let me clarify that last statement - I think that a good textbook is an essential element of a good education on a particular subject, but I do not think that it is the only element required. A well-rounded education should also include hands-on lab time (costs money) and people you can ask to help you and to explain what you are having problems understanding (costs money).
Now, if this book is aimed at people for whom money is a problem, isn't it naive to think that they have access to a computer (and enough time on that computer to read and understand the text)?
This book could quite possibly replace existing texts and lower the cost of an education, but I doubt that it would become the entire education. However, I don't think that you can have too many alternative texts on a subject, especially when they are free.
You may be interested by the Dedekind library:
http://books.pdox.net/
I downloaded the textbook and it looks real good. I wish I could do the problems and know if I got the right answer or not. Wait, no professor on earth would be able to use this textbook then. Damn.
For those of you who are interested in free (as in speech and beer) textbooks, please check out Wikibooks. It's a Wiki, like the Wikipedia, but wholly devoted to offering free books (primarily textbooks).
I'm not involved in running Wikibooks, I just use it and contribute to it, and I think it's a great project worth spreading the word about; plus, the more people contribute to it, the better it is.
Fuck it
For example, Michael Faraday, received very little education. Everything he learned was from books that came to him as a bookbinder. Now lets say, he newer became a bookbinder. What would have happened? Wonderfull mind would not have been used for what it was used.
Thats a great example, when right people get their hands on books which are in interest of them wonderfull things can happen.
I hope we will see more online books. Now the education will be available pretty much to everyone who has access to a computer. Not only those who's parents rich, can afford them to send to best colleges in the world.
Anyone aggree with me? or see my point?
Maybe some overclocker websites can finally pull their heads outta their arses and read a textbook on the subject. :(
Somehow my definition of "Humanitarian Aid for online O/C'ers" didn't meet Amazon's requirements for cheap books
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I still have on one of my hard drives somewhere a PDF file that points out really horrible errors in typical school textbooks; these were mostly high-school books, but in any case, it really points to the pressures that are placed on book publishers; many pressures that have nothing to do with accuracy of information, but coming from a sense of policital correctedness, and so on. There are influential people in the management levels of the textbook publishers, and there are certain standards that must be upheld in order for that book to be selected by a school system, especially a school system that is funded with taxpayer dollars. Obviously, having checks and balances when it comes to taxpayer dollars is an important thing. But the errors are pretty bad, and there are quite a few of them, at least in the one review there that I read.
Perhaps the idea of putting this kind of information online, if there is a way that this can be done without too much lost inertia from the fact that you are just giving away your hard work for nothing (i.e. also sell the book in hard-copy), have a donation place for it, or somehow organize funding in some other way. Also, you don't necessarily go through a big publisher to do it this way - you can have more freedom to simply produce an accurate textbook, without having some committee breathing down your neck or having your work thrown in haphazardly with ten other authors' work.
And there may be more control over the authorship, and the way the whole thing is put together.
But generally speaking, for instance, O'Reilly books are not that particularly expensive, and I just kind of feel better contributing some type of financial money to the author, and having a hard-copy book has its benefits as well, in case you feel like not being tied down to the computer or laptop screen. I like buying books, but I also like using electronic formats sometimes (it's easier and faster to take notes), it's especially cool when you are studying a programming language and you can see examples in the book and try out your own while you are physically sitting at your computer.
Electronic formats are good, and hard-copies are good too. What really needs to happen is that the cost of the textbooks, the hardcopy textbooks, need to come down by at least 50%. Again, this can be blamed on the "big publishing companies" - many of the policies and procedures that are commonplace at these types of embedded publishers drive the costs of textbooks up, and increase the number of errors in those textbooks at the same time. Paying some 30 dollars for a very excellent O'Reilly book, for instance, is really no big deal, considering how long it's going to take to read it and work through it, and hopefully the authors are getting some kind of reward in there too. Having an electronic format available for free, especially in the situation where one has purchased the hardcopy, is, I think, a really good idea; especially if that electronic format can have an errata somewhere or something.
To sum up, I think that the price of textbooks needs to come down, and the errors need to be lesser in number as well. These two things appear to be tied in together, to some extent. Furthermore, there should be a means to reward the authors for their work; I don't think that giving away books for free is really going to encourage people to write quality material; there needs to be some sort of way to integrate the hard copy and the electronic copy in a way that increases the benefits to the reader and still rewards the author and encourages more people to write quality material.
I think that this is going to turn out to not be quite as easy as it sounds.
This is a wonderful initiative, which I think most of us will want to encourage - but to really determine it's value, we need to know how good the book is. Does it match the standards of currently available conventional (i.e. expensive) texts? It would be great to see a review by a highly-qualified engineer or professor.
If anyone knows of more Pure Mathematic books online. :( ...
By the way Thanks for the Dedekind link!
But when I search the net (or P2P) - I find that most e-books are PDFs and I hate PDF's so much
I know a Maths textbook would be impossible to be done in text and HTMLing one would be way too much effort
but I am seriously averse to PDFs (maybe it's just me?) - finding them somewhat demotivating.
I never go beyond page 10 - in sharp contrast with HTML or Text which I read cover to cover.
First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle)
:D
maybe it's a five year cycle for true science texts, but for everything else in the US college system it seems like new editions come out yearly or bi-yearly. Thus negating the usefulness of the return that book you bought at the end of the semester. 'cause they won't want it any more..
You-know, I thought Gutenberg liberating books with movable type meant freedom of information on some level. Look how we've started to turn back the wheels of progress by making these texts a) artificially overpriced and b) released in such rapid succession youj can't return them to get some of your 'investment' back
So, kudos to the author(s) for releasing this book in such a way. Maybe the overclockers will learn a trick or two
(just HAD to bitch about the state of college texts. forgive me..)
Great ideas that lead to bigger and better things never get there when people are at risk of losing their big paychecks. Some guy is a millionaire because he owns a publishing company that can sell textbooks at $100+ a pop. He's not gonna sit there and watch his annual income go down the toilet. Same thing with the oil, alcohol, medical, computer industry etc...
> First, in electronic format, textbooks can be ...and third, hard working people who struggle to pay college tuition, please continue paying outrageous taxes and tuitions to keep me in my 6000 square foot house. We could offset it by diverting profits back into the university, but that would be useful.
> continually corrected and updated...Second,
> free textbooks hold the potential for
> fundamentally altering the economics of higher
> education...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
For the last year I have tried to only study without buying any course related books, only the extra material made for the course. The books that I need to read, I read at university's libraries and I found that it's easier to concentrate on studying when there aren't things to be disturbed of. Also I find it a little ridiculous to buy a huge book of hundreds of pages that usually doesn't have any use after the course. That way I also can find books worth buying that have their uses after the course (like general purpose books about algorithms).
John Lienhard (the U. of Houston one) is the host of "The Engines of Our Ingenuity" radio program. If you haven't heard any of these, get the transcripts or see if the program is on in your area. I've always found them excellent.
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
As a new Assistant Professor at a U.S. institution, I am required to perform Teaching, Research, Service, and publish scholarly publications in PEER REVIEWED journals, etc. If this is not done satisfactorily, I will be released within several years. In order for the writing of textbooks to contribute to my retention, the 'system' requires publication through a 'major' commercial publisher in your field of knowledge. This is a major reason, IMHO, that we do not see more offerings like the subject of this article. Most professors are lucky to make 10% profit on their text publishing and my discussions in this matter with the publishing houses reveals their near-future plans to offer electronic texts online...on a chapter-by-chapter basis. This would allow instructors to assemble their own 'custom assembled' texts for courses.
The OU on some courses make the course texts available as pdf files and these have less errata in them than the printed copys.
:(
However this compliments the paper copies rather than replaces them.
In reader you can search for key words which is invaluble whem working on TMA questions as a few seconds searching takes you to a relevent section but then I open the printed book and use that to work from.
A real book allows you to highlight key sections make notes in the margin.
The E-book also means I can work anywhere I have internet access. perhaps if i had two monitors I could put the ebook on one and work on the other
I can work with 2 computers but as many of us know its easy to type into the wrong keyboard.
having the E-book is a great help out of 3 courses I do, only 1 gives the oportunity to get the E-Book.
Outside the OU Longman does an electronic version of its dictionary on cdrom that comes with the paper copy and this again is perhaps more useful than the paper copy although not everything is included from the paper copy cross referencing is a lot simpler.
The EBook form is a definate bonus longmans dictionary is copy protected so they do not lose sales and I wish more publishers would follow their lead.
Right now I have a book on order from penguin that is taking forever to arrive. since I have already placed my order for the paper copy perhaps they could make an E Copy available for download. print on demand still means a wait of at least 4 weeks
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Lets take calculus, which has not reallly changed in, say , 200 years... I could buy a nice, acid free paper reprint, which will last for years without batteries for a few dollars from dover, or I could spend 100s of $$ to have something which only works out of the rain, in the right light.... This is an example of not focusing on the problem. The problem is not the delivery technology (print vs online), or the need for updating on a 5 yr cycle (does heat transfer really change that much ?). The problem is the (a) the greed inspired by our capitlist system, which winds up screwing the students, and (b) the complicity of professors, educators and boards of education, which in many states mandate texts. ... To restate the point, if you ask, not is it neat technology, but how would I best serve the students. I think that a co-operative, nonprofit publisher, organized over the net with cvs like software, putting out nice high quality texts on acid free paper, would be a better solution for high school and entry college texts.
Even in fast moving fields ( I am familiar with molecular biology, genomics and genetics) most of what gets taught is old; you only need a small handout each year for updating.
Even on a strict environmental basis, if only 10% of the "free" heat transfer texts get printed out, is that a plus, considering that home printers are probably environmental disasters, compared to commercial plants ?
Sure, sounds dull but heat is looking like a viable way of storing energy generated from renewable sources.
e ne rgy/sol_thermal/powertower.html
CAES systems use air compressed using energy from off peak generation to provide generation capacity during peak hours:
http://www.pbworld.com/pbenergy/caes.htm
Already implemented in Germany and Alabama.
The Solar II power tower system in California stores concentrated heat from the sun in molten salt in order to generate power at night and during cloudy periods.
http://rhlx01.rz.fht-esslingen.de/projects/alt_
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Great initiative. Although I have no problems acquiring text books for a *decent* price. Basically, this is not a problem of the authors or the buying public, but the greed of publishers who focus on profit only and do not really care about distrubuting knowledge. Therefore I say, great initiative!
For some reason, acroread 5.* segfaults of RedHat 9.0. And acroread 4.* is not good for this texbook as they warn. But xpdf works fine -- that's how I read it now.
I went to one of the University of Wisconsin schools and the University rented all of the books to us as part as our students fees. (which were the same if not lower than most other schools) If you really wanted to own the books you could buy them back for less than $5 a piece. They normally didn't have the most recent editions avalible to buy, but with engineering the equations don't change so it doesn't really matter. My point is I will never need to look at at book from my liberal arts classes ever again so why should I pay over $50 for it?
Has anyone used this text book before? It is all very well giving away books for free, but if they aren't that good anyway, you still have to buy another one. When I have a spare moment I will try to look through the book more carefully, but from a cursory glance, it looks good so far.
Open technology, open culture, open society. These are necessities for freedom.
There are no digital rights, only digital slavery.
There you are, staring at me again.
strange brew, that's good for you.
On my campus, the Statics 1 class has gone through three different textbooks in as many years (and stress = young's modulus * strain hasn't changed a whole lot in that time). Many other textbooks also seem to rotate editions every 2-2.5 years except for those few books you really want to keep.
I wish these gentlemen the best of luck with this and certaintly hope that the faculty in my department will give it a look. My heat transfer book was not terribly good, cost too much and had no resale value (so I kept it). This e-text certainly wins in one regard.
no funny comment for this story! ... one more proof that engineering is dull and boring
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
These same people produce a wonderful website called How Inventive Minds Work. A beautiful and thoughful website. See www.uh.edu/engines. !!! plus you an downlaod the textbook from there.
Thank you John H Lienhard V and John H Lienhard IV.
Having lived in Africa all my life I know how prohibitively expensive education can be for so many people in poorer countries. It is truly uplifting to read about the gift you have given and I truly hope that you have set an example for many others. Thank you!
Free Firefox news reader.
Lienhard's course is available on OpenCourseWare as well, to go along with the posted Heat Transfer textbook. It's a very thorough read for an intermediate-level class, happy learning :-)
Here's the link
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
Hope they keep printed copies though incase something ever happens to computers.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
It's a pity that the OU don't teach spelling.
(And yes, I am an OU student, thanks for asking.)
But I downloaded it. Gave them correct information. Plan to expand my horizons by finding out what it is about.
On a side note, the Economist recently ran an article asking if Public Libraries are now out dated. If so then it is says a lot about society and not much of that is bad. Making texts of books like this available is a start, making the fact that they are available is the real task. Perhaps the government can use some of that money wasted on pork barrel projects to provide a public "Internet library" which collects such releases as this?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How about open, realtime editing, creation, correcting, and updating of free, GFDL'd textbooks? It's already here: check out wikibooks.
The vast majority of textbooks don't make a significant amount of money. Certainly not enough to justify writing them for that purpose alone.
I remember text books in College. What a racket!
1. Write Text Book (introduced with typo errors).
2. Get Professor to force students to buy.
3. Write new Text Book (same as old, but with some typos fixed, and some new ones introduced.
4. Next semester, Get Professor to force students to buy newer improved version.
5. Go back to step 3.
------
If I were in college today, I would be outraged if I were required to buy a single text book.
Everything is on the net.
A five year cycle? Seems to me that they never had much trouble putting out new editions of most of the expensive textbooks every year or two when I was in college, and I only finished two years ago. I swear I saw at least three or four different covers on those damn massive Biology and Calculus textbooks that got progressively more expensive every freakin' year. Good thing I didn't have to buy them. I see no excuse why any college shouldn't start using this and other similar online texts for the fall semester. If it's good enough for MIT...
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
But there are a few things that the publishers do provide that contribute to the quality of the book. Publishers can take care of layout, complicated drawings and photos, photo copyright permissions, and lots of other mundane production issues. More importantly, they will send out draft copies of new texts, new editions, or chapters of new editions to other professors in the field to get feedback and to provide quality control.
There may be tools which help self-published authors take care of formatting and layout, and you may not need to use all those pictures (or you can make your own). But if this is to succeed as a way to publish quality textbooks some mechanism of "peer review" is needed. That might end up being word of mouth, or there might have to be some kind of stamp of approval from some group people respect. Or some new mechanism we haven't figured out yet.
But I do think it's an interesting idea, and I hope it works. Years ago, before the web, I had thought about getting together some notes on quantum field theory and putting them out for anonymous FTP, without my name on them, as the "anonymous Field Theory Primer" :-)
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
I have written several published books - overall a very fun experience, but for one thing:
I would occasionally get emails from people teaching classes to students who no-way could afford to buy my books (usually in 3rd world countries). These teachers would ask for permission to copy a few chapters for class distribution - something that I did not have the right to do.
My solution to this problem was to write 2 free web books using a Creative Commons license (I was the featured commoner about a year ago).
I still write books for publication, but to be honest, writing free books under a CC license is way more satisfying.
-Mark
It was our idea that we should start with an introductory physics text, say, basic mechanics. The ultimate product would be an .iso disk image which contains not only a textbook, but recordings of key lectures, some highly compressed video and simulations of certain experiments, perhaps rendered in a GPL 3D graphics engine (where physical principles would be programmed in, and students could manipulate the setup and observe realistic changes in the results).
This would be a large and publicised project, and one that could/should attract enough NSF funding to cover its modest costs. (I've seen the NSF give money to much more frivolous ideas!) The initial text might be a "donation" from a cooperating professor, and the audio/video lecture fragments would also be solicited recorded in the classrooms of truly excellent faculty. (Nobody I talked to about this said he/she would refuse.) The various programs and simulations that need to be written would come from contracted, qualified and paid programmers and graduate students. (And perhaps volunteers.) All their code would be GPL.
Once the project gets going, a working group, organized much like an editorial board, would solicit and review new submissions and alterations. There can be arbitrarily many exercise problems, as well as detailed explanations of their solutions.
These would fully take advantage of the digital format. One weakness of paper textbooks is that by their nature, they have space for only a few fully-solved and explained sample exercises. This would not be a limitation of an electronic text. In fact, how to solve an exercise could be explained in several different ways by different instructors, maximizing the chance the student would "get it". I imagine an interface where next to each step, there is a small "how does this follow?" button. If pressed, it opens a small window describing the motivation of a certain transition.
Many of these details and elaborations could be contributed by users of the textbook. Like any major software project, there would be a moderated online forum to discuss issues related to the textbook. Ultimate decisions about how the text should be updated (the regular "distributions" of the GPL material) would be made by the editorial board. In academia many professors participate in editing journals pro bono, and we could expect something similar here. Feedback on the various aspects of the text would be solicited directly from students and instructors, and the editorial board would post "requests for updates" with specific issues that need to be addressed to make the project a better learning tool.
Well, we thought about many more details of implementation, but they are boring and you guys might have better ideas anyway. The point of the whole project would be primarily to have a supplement to introductory college-level classes, but the uses go far beyond that. The textbook would be designed to be self-learner friendly, something a motivated high-school student could easily work through. It could be duplicated cheaply and en masse (at first it would be a set of CD-ROMS, eventually transitioning to DVD-ROMS). In places where poverty, georgaphy and cultural factors limit access to higher education (which includes parts of the USA), people will still have simple computers and can cover the $2 for a burned DVD-ROM.
Of course, the idea would be to get one "hit" textbook and then reuse the software and other infrastructure to make more. Not only would this textbook require sequels, but also a demand for a calculus textbook in the same format. These are ideal fields for getting the project rolling, because introductory math, physics and chemistry textbooks don't get obsolete very quickly. How this project would be paid for re
I think most recent college grads will agree that the cost of books for students in any B.S. level degree have moved into the rape-me cost bracket. Would this be such a bad idea? Make me pay for a hard copy version, but if I want to get the basic information, I can always go to the library, copy pages from a page, or check out the online version. Maybe we can keep it honest by setting up the online version so you definetly can't print it out, or some kind of DRM. But in the end, I think the availabilty of such valuable information online would really help our education system.
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Industries making billions just don't roll over when you propose they make 0.
... especially for free.
Prediction: For using their books, textbook publishers will soon get universities to sign comprehensive noncompete agreements, whereby their professors can't go and do "Communist" things like publish their own books
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I'm currently a junior at MIT. I just looked through the book and felt it is pretty well written. One thing that should be considered that all textbooks, just as all heat and mass transfer books, are not made equal.
At MIT both the Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Departments use Incropera and DeWitt's Heat and Mass Transfer book. The free textbook seems like it may have the potential to be a good alternative, but as always, I judge a textbook more by the quality and relevance of the problems at the end of the chapter than the text itself. since the concepts of heat transfer have been around forever, concepts such as heat exchangers, lumped capacitance, etc. will be uniform throughout free and non-free textbooks.
Free High School Science Textbooks
How about this (page 4):
If all the people in the United States worked continuously like galley slaves, they could barely equal the power output of even a single city power plant
I also learned about the transfer by radiation and black bodies. Even if the sun was surrounded by nothing to sun would still lose energy by emitting photons.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
In the UK there are subscription services for institutions to sign up to. My University (Sunderland) curently has Safari on trial. There's only a handful of books available under the trial but it's a nice selection with some O'Reilly, Sams Teach Yourself, and some authorised books from Macromedia and Microsoft.
There's also Heron from the excellent people at Ingenta who put all the journals online.
It's nice to see my fees put to some good use rather than fancy lighting and LED information boards.
As a BioMed Engineering student who doesn't want to have to pay for both engineering and biology texts, I have found the Bookshelf at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=B ooks invaluble. The full texts are even fully searchable.
Let's face it. Textbooks in the US cost an arm and
;-) I am tired of
a leg. Whereas in India for e.g, textbooks are
relatively quite cheap. Since textbooks there are
published in English, and many of them are of
equivalent quality -- I have seen my University
Electronics design textbook -- in a local library
here, if open publishing of textbooks takes off,
the following benefits could occur:
1. Bring down the cost of printed textbooks to a much more affordable level.
2. Give exposure to authors outside of the US.
3. Raise the overall quality of books because of
more competition.
4. Students of other poor countries have cheap
access to US books and similarly US students have
easy access to books published outside of the US
-- getting a whole new perspective, so to speak.
5. Open text books even if not published in
English, may be partially machine translated and
partially by volunteer effort -- a la HOWTO's and
open source docs today -- reaching a much larger
audience than the original native edition.
6. Monopoly of big and expensive publishing houses
is broken.
7. We might see quotations in books from non
English speaking countries
seeing authors repeatedly quote Shakespeare and
other Anglo-Saxon authors or stuff like baseball
and other US games in books which no one outside
the US really cares for.
Writing a coherent text clarifies one's knowledge of a subject. If you havent taken the time to write down your material, even in an informal text, then you probably havent consolidated your subject well.
The National Library of Medicine makes available a number (maybe 25?) of the electronic versions of print textbooks on a variety of topics. This can be an excellent resource. Check it out.
The software we developed (I was the programmer on the project) was used for several classes on campus at Utah State University, where the project was based from, under the direction of Dr. R. Kent Wood (he has since retired). Our primary emphasis was more toward K-12 learning, but it proved to be quite popular with several computer-based learning groups including C.A.L.I.C.O, a group of individuals working on acquiring forign language skills through computer-based learning.
There are several issues that need to be dealt with in regards to multimedia development. Some of them have been solved compared to what I was dealing with in the past, but some still are huge problems:
It's great to see people putting free textbooks online. It's nothing new, though. Check out
http://samizdat.mines.edu/
To see several on-line works (mostly geophysics stuff) that have been available for a number of years.
Universities could collect, say, a $5 per student course fee for an official license for the e-book. O'Reilly or Amazon or someone new could handle distribution and payment collection. There would be no copy protection or other annoyances, paying students could download (and keep) the complete books and everyone could view them online. Payment would largely be on the honor system. It would be useful to have a single, organized site to distribute the books.
The course fee approach would be very efficient and still provide a nice recurring revenue stream. Overhead in general would be minimal.
The biggest potential flaw: are professors and administrators honest enough to collect and pay the course fees?
I think this system would fit academia extremely well.
free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce.
Oh great. Offshoring gets easier and easier.
The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away.
So, how long before we start seeing Ebay banner ads in our free e-textbooks?
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Back in January we had this thread on textbook price gouging.
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"Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so."-Lawrence Lessig
The University of Texas College of Liberal Arts ITS has been pursuing projects like this for a few years, with their French, Spanish and Texas Politics textbooks.
As far as my experiences have gone, most, if not all, of my classes included texts with solutions manuals for all the problems. My grades came primarily from either quizzes and tests or from homework problems formulated by the professor that could not be found in the book. Book problems were assigned mainly for their usefulness as study aids - nothing was stopping people from just copying from the solutions manuals, and indeed many did in the classes where homework was required, but even then, homework was a very small fraction of the overall grade.
For those interested in helping a new organization dedicated to building and promoting copylefted university materials, check out the Free Curricula Foundation.
Our focus is on materials for students and faculty in the developing world, but certainly not exclusively.
One way we'd like to start is by polishing public domain materials for subjects like calculus that haven't changed since before Steamboat Willy.
-=Steve=-The Lienhards have done an outstanding job. I tried to get NSF funding to assemble and put texts online four years ago. My proposal was declined, but I've kept assembling the books in my spare time online anyway. There are three of them: Natural Aerosols, Radiative Transfer, Particle Size distributions, all GFDL's and available here. Enjoy!
You take that 90 year old dover reprint on calculus and make sure you learn your quaternions well...
No idea where you'll learn about vectors, but hey who needs those, right? They're just a useful abstraction, nothing fundamentally different. Now go and try learning some physics.
Why not start off with a 60 year old Quantum Mechanics book. It was all there, right? Enjoy the piecemeal theory and obsolete notation.
But the physics is the same, so who cares?
Dover books are a treasure, but if you really want to learn a topic rather than just having historical curiousity for a topic, you need a relatively modern book. Who really wants to learn about E+M for the first time from Maxwell's original papers?
I'm only a few years out of college, and I well remember having to sell back reasonably important textbooks (Algorithms & Data Structures, Intro to Calculus, etc) just so I could afford gas to drive home over vacation. After getting an internship in my upper-division years, I found myself buying back these same textbooks for reference. I'm told this was common practice for students who later went into corporate accounting ;-)
It would have been nice to just purchase one or more CDs containing my textbooks for the semester in HTML format. The next year's issue might be updated, but at least I'd have had a permanent (barring CD rot of course) copy for later reference. It'd also solve the problem of students having different versions of the same textbook...there always seemed to be confusion in the first week or two of class between the new/old release, the professor having an updated "teacher's edition", or some students who pooled their cash and bought a single copy to share.
A final point...it'd sure help with these BOXES of books I got stored in my attic now.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
- Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.
Take one part secure eBook format, one part trusted computing, and one part extensible markup. Mix vigorously and serve with a side of Freedom fries.Dr. Spork,
Could you please email me? Your profile doesn't list your contact email.
Thanks!
It really is a shame that the licensing issues basically left this thing impossible to resurrect. The next time grant-committes throw money to a similar idea, I hope they realize the GPL will give them the most bang for the buck.
I re-read my post and I don't want to make it sound like we have a working group that is looking to do some grant-writing. Disclaimers: Actually, I'm still not done with my dissertation, so my /. name is a bit premature. And when my dissertation is finished, it will be in Philosophy (though I did Physics as an undergrad and had some awesome professors who made me "see" the principles - and this is what inspired me to do this multimedia book idea).
There is a project I'm involved with, which really is accreting material: we are reading classics of philosophy, ones that students are commonly assigned, and releasing the performances into the public domain in .mp3 format. So far we have all of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undertanding, and the website for the project is due to go live later this summer. My students have already given me very positive reviews about the readings. But this open-source textbook project could be a huge, potentially world-changing thing. So if anyone finds some grant money for innovative education projects, you don't have to credit me to get the project rolling.
While we have the likes of CBS splashing high-level quotes to hawk their latest "expose", like...
"We wouldn't want have people without degrees in Homeland Security."
One must wonder. Since knowledge now apparently has exactly ZERO value, in and of itself, who cares what is available? Spend $50K, or get someone else to spend it, or you still end up below poverty as a K-Mart cashier.
We simply do not, can not, respect KNOWLEDGE when the MONEY is the God of Fact.
I admire MIT - to an extent. They're publishing alot of things, ahead of their time, but are also strongly reinforcing (abusing) a world where important decisions are decided on patently peripheral (non-contributing) issues, with bigot like zeal. "No degree - no job" is exactly as bad as "Black - no job".
Free the exchange of information all you want - but until we actually have a system dedicated to actually using it, the US will continue to decline.
All Computer Science and Electrical Engineering majors at the University of Texas are required to take EE316 (Digital Logic Design) at the University of Texas. The class textbook was written by the professor of the course (Charles Roth) and with software included costs approxmiately $140 new. The Text is on its fifth edition and I believe a lot of the changes are for no reason other than to force students to buy new books. At the beginning of the semester (the only time one sees one of the professors in this self-paced class), the other overseeing professor made it a point to encourage everyone to write in the book when answering homework problems -- quite obviously so students would not be able to sell them back. I thought that was bad enough when I swallowed the price myself, but they even had the gall to send out an e-mail to all sections of the class saying everyone had an important decision to make: Whether or not to sell back the text! And of course, it was a good idea not to as this book is a valuable reference to keep, yadda. Anyway it sort of sickened me that the profs of the course were so brazen about it. It's an excellent text, no doubt, and it has to be since the class is self-paced (meaning, the textbook is your only real source of instruction), but its horrendously overpriced and updated to new editions with odd frequency. If all thats not enough, a 20 page "course supplement" must also be purchased for the class to nick you for another 5 dollars - why this is not availible as a PDF (or whatever) it pretty obvious. Anyway, perhaps authors dont make much from texts, but Charles Roth at UT-Austin appears to be doing his best to pad his retirement (which is coming soon). As for me, fortunately this book will be good for at least another semester, so fortunately I will be able to get back some of the $140 I spent on this book... if I ever need a reference, I'll go buy a copy of a previous edition for $5 from one of the hoardes of prior EE or CS students at UT who got nailed on a semester a new edition was coming out...
Hello All, This is a _very_ nice move. Would help a ton of students learn, and save them a ton of $$. Textbooks published in the US/UK - mostly U.S. - represent a signifcant portion of the curriculum in EE/CS/CompEngr. Texts like the "dragon books", or the OS books, or Taub & Schilling or Millman & Halkias, Benjamin Kuo (control systems) are worth their weight in gold - but still basically unaffordable in the _converted_ currency. Open/cheaper/free textbooks would be a welcome move in many countries. Yes they still need to get access to the www to download the book - but that is becoming easier by the day. RSK.
Make it a live-cd!!! This way the execution environment is guaranteed, without the student needing to have Linux installed. Plus open-source gets more exposure.
.ISO image.
Also, distribute all the (specialized) tools necessary to modify and re-create the cd - either for fixing errors, or for creating new books. If there isn't enough room, distribute it as a second CD. Preferrably, everything necessary should be included, rather than just the specialized things.
I.e. include a word processor, not just the script that bundles all the files into an
Become A Real Millionaire, in 10 seconds, on your computer! (rf=really fast) Read manual, YMMV.
rm -rf *
would be if video clips of professors at boards explaining concepts were made freely available.
In multiple languages.
Yes, students would still miss out on mutual interaction, but this would be a great way to increase access to higher education.
And not just engineering, despite its importance. But mathematics, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, 2nd languages, should be course offerings, too.
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