Slashdot Mirror
Competition In the Free Textbook Market
bcrowell writes "The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs. They plan to make their profits from add-ons like podcast study guides and mobile phone flashcards. Books will be licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Other companies trying to find a workable business model for free textbooks include Ink Textbooks (revenue from online homework) and Freeload Press (revenue from ads inside the books). So far, none of these companies seems to have succeeded in building up much of a catalog of books; it seems more common for authors of free textbooks to take a DIY approach, putting PDFs on their own web pages, and sometimes arranging on-demand printing with vanity-press publishers like lulu.com. Lots and lots of web sites exist to help people find free textbooks, and CalPIRG has an active campaign pushing for affordable textbooks."
One of the nicest things I find about studying in Finland is that the university provides enough textbooks in the library for students to use. It's nice to escape the cycle of buying textbooks and then having to sell them four months down the road.
I want that genius kdawson to give me sexual healing, RIGHT NOW!!!
Free textbooks are great and all if you want to learn the subject, like Yale/Harvard's free classroom recordings. But if you're taking a class at a university, most of the time these aren't going to be useful. Economics, engineering, calculus, all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book. I bought one edition earlier than the one recommended for my economics class and I've had to borrow my friends text to do all the work. Great idea, but I don't see it being useful unless you can somehow get all the college professors to start adopting them/copy the homework separately. (Given that a lot of books are written by the professors themselves, they are unlikely to drop a major revenue stream)
Now, someone once argued with me that information changes and you need to have the latest info. Well, I replied, there's several years lead time from writing to publishing a text and therefore, it's out of date before it's published. And besides, tell me what advances in business that are occurring that requires those in B-school to have the "latest" info? Hmmm? (Even in the group psychology class where you'd think with the social sciences improving there'd would be a need for up to date info. Nope. I had to buy a $120 paperback that told us about Myers-Briggs and when you had a problem with an employee, the correct answer for everything was send him to "sensitivity training". I'm not fucking kidding.) If you have to teach the latest info, then you shouldn't use textbooks.
Adoption by opencourseware would no doubt improve visiblity of these projects. I also wonder if content taken from opencourseware could be put into these books.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
What if they gave a Slashdot posting... and nobody came?
Ya know that guy who always sits in the dormitory stairwell muttering about "that bastard Bush and all the goddam neocons"? The one the freshmen sorority pledges always try to step around but they can't because he and his shit are taking up three whole stairs? Yup, it has been kdawson all along.
One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.
Also I am not too keen on the lower cost electronic versions of the books unless the publishers are monitored carefully. The electronic editions I have seen cost slightly less than the paper edition, and expire after 6 months. Students then are poorer as a result.
My second semester freshman physics text (Sears and Zemansky, the standard of its day (1965)) has the price of $7.50 stamped in it. This was about 4x the miniumum wage. It has ~500 pages, weighs 2.2 lbs (1 kg), and no color.
No reason why this book could not be used today, except a conspiracy by publishers to raise profits by adding lots of extra material, color photos etc, frequently changing editions to devalue used copies.
Life was good then, the was no tuition at the University of California where I attended and gas was $0.29 a gallon (6 gal = 1 hr minimum wage). The biggest downside was no word processors.
Slightly overlooked here is the fact that the Internet has commoditized information. That is to say, it has done to book sellers what it has done to the **AA.
While it is not in the public eye as much, several here have pointed out the huge monetary waste in buying/selling text books, and the book sellers/education system keep updating so that users are caught in a continual upgrade cycle. When there is a method of cheap updates the continued use of repetitive upgrade cycles in paper issued texts is nothing short of usury.
Any educational institution that wants to be a valued place to attend should be flowing with the times and 'getting it' now, not 4 years from now, or not when the board members want to think about it. This technology is here NOW, and it's yesterday's news, not some high tech promise for the future.
Yes, it only takes one meeting to start the ball rolling to ensure that the electronic texts match what classes and professors teach, and that the paper and electronic forms are identical in content. The fact that they are not yet is nothing less than gouging.
Yes, damn it, it is THAT simple. We will NOT buy your text books UNLESS you provide electronic access to the same identical texts. That is ALL it takes. Publishers will jump to get the business.
Look, if I can buy the book for $90 or get access to it from a school server in electronic form for $25, I'll probably go for the electronic. The costs of books is about 30% printing/distribution. The rest has to be done for both formats.
I stopped buying programming books some time ago because all I need is behind that Google screen. Even very high quality PhD materials are available on the Internet.
While people are worried how they will make money they have missed out on the fact that information itself has now become a commodity. Time for change, here and now, not next year. The **AA is having to deal with it and their example of doing so is not one that publishers really want to go with. They need to look at social websites and other popular websites to ensure that their chosen method of 'upgrade' is going to work.
My suggestions?
Offer electronic texts, sell paper based Q/A sections. DRM won't work, so there will be copying, can't get around that. The photocopier put paid to any such scheme long ago. Now it's just easier. Make it easily available. Make it fun. If an account based system is used, make it more useful than just retrieving texts. Add value to the account. Charge for the account through the school system so that students have an EASY way to pay if they wish. When you have done it right students will be making your website their homepage, if you're looking for milestones in your effort.
As far as information goes, give people readers for your content for free, and make them work on ANYTHING. Charge a service fee for the account, and only charge for premium content beyond that. Yes, there will be copying, but then people borrowed books all the time before this anyway. Quit fretting and suing, just make your content the best available and work out how to survive on lower margins in a commoditized market.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
How much is that in real money? :-P
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
One of the main problems of the textbook market is that the buyer has usually no choice but to buy the book.
The real choice is made by the instructor, who has NO incentive to choose a cheaper textbook. Intructors (I am one of them) are heavily sought by the publishing houses (in my experience once exception is O'Reilly, the worse Pearson Education).
The second hand market is one of the few attempts to lower prices. Publishes counter-act it by dropping frequent updates (usually needless).
The only way to counter act this inflation is with the help of the instructors who have little motivation (except ethical) to help.
One of the few ways I think this can change is if instructors ask for an old version of the textbook. The problem of course, is availability. And you really want to make sure everybody has the same textbook
--dmg
Mod this jackass spammer down.
Back in the mid 90s when I was at Uni, there was a lot of complaining over the price of books, e.g. £25 for each volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There was also a lot of anger towards copyrights. I remember a sign in the college Library with a cartoon cat warning students not to photocopy sheet music, and people had written underneath "Music is not just for fat cats to make a profit".
If we could have magically just duplicated our books, we would have been handing them around to everyone and spending the money on beer instead. I'm not saying it's right, but we definitely would have done it. Today that "Magic Duplication" is very easy to do since I'm sure most books have been scanned in by somebody. I can imagine DVD's with thousands of books on them being passed around colleges all over the world.
Sure this is a nice service, but it is dependent upon instructors/authors to upload books to Flat World Knowledge. Most professors, in my experience, like money more than spreading knowledge and competence. They will likely choose not to participate unless there is some incentive for them to actually upload the book PDF.
This gets back to the whole reason why some need the services Flat World Knowledge in the first place: avarice.
Publishing companies and authors could easily make their materials more accessible to professionals and students. However, they choose to use the most costly, self-enriching, wasteful, and inaccessible medium possible. Imagine how much better life would be for a person who is blind to use voice-recognition software on his or her computer to listen to his or her SAT, GRE, or national certification exam book. Why limit it just to people with blindness? What about the college student with cerebral palsy (yes, they do exist) that doesn't have the motor control to turn the pages of a book, but with a PDF and the right software, can read the text just as effectively.
I could go on forever with examples. Here's the bottom line: there is absolutely no reason for publishing companies and authors to limit their books to paper format in the first place. They can even make a profit off of this new technology. But I guess they would rather continue with current practice, which only serves to truncate innovation and progress.
I, for one, welcome our free textbook overlords. ...I wouldn't mind so much if the textbooks I needed were eBooks, so I could pirate them... but alas, they never are.
I live in a place where those who live forever come to die.
At Cambridge University, I've been developing a system called the Intelligent Book, that changes the idea of "an online textbook" into something that might genuinely be more useable and useful than a paper book, and much less cost/effort to write. (Though a paper book certainly can be printed from it.) This has some implications for the textbook market if it does take off, because online collaborative/interactive materials provided by a university tend to be free to students, and increasingly to the wider public.
The public demonstrator is not yet online, so this link just goes to parking, but if you want to revisit it later, it will be gradually going up at http://www.theintelligentbook.com/.
It came out of my PhD, completed a year ago, which in turn was part of a joint project with MIT.
I spent over $500 on textbooks, and when I dropped my chemistry course (I'm in arts, but I wrongly decided to take chem), they said that I can't get a refund because I had had the books for over 2 weeks. It was 1 week into the semester, and I had bought the books 2 weeks before classes started. As a first year, I mistakenly assumed that if I had a textbook in sealed packing with a receipt, that they should return it. I now refuse to buy textbooks from my university bookstore (here at UBC), and instead look to alternatives. Here there a few, there is the discount book store that sells books at a reasonable discount, and also buys books back for much more than the ripoff UBC bookstore. Unfortunately, selection is limited, but as a first year taking popular classes its all good. The most interesting one however, is the iBook union, where a group of students will sell your textbooks on your behalf and give you more money that any bookstores would.
The best solution, which only applies if your pretty smart and taking easy classes, is to just not buy textbooks. I didn't buy any textbooks this year, photocopied important parts from friends, got my poli sci text from my local library (and renewed it twice, saved $60), or just suck it up and actually attend classes.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Textbook Revolution is a major source of free textbooks in many subjects.
Wikipedia-based Free AI Textbook is one example of the future of free textbooks -- in this case, for the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence.
The Free AI Textbook is really in three parts: the 2002 print-on-demand AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence; AI mind-module update pages; and AI background links into topical AI areas of Wikipedia, where a vast army of AI experts is constantly updating the free AI textbook.
Mind for MSIE is the free, tutorial AI source code (in JavaScript; also in Forth) described in the free AI textbook.
MIT has an Open Courseware project that "shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum." : http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
Nicole Allen, Textbooks Program Director at CalPIRG, wrote to say that a more relevant link than the CalPIRG link at the end of my slashdot summary would be maketextbooksaffordable.org. That's where the information about CalPIRG's open textbooks campaign is.
Find free books.
Oddly enough, a wiki would probably be the best solution, at least for non-humanities courses. I've used wikipedia to great effect in math and hard science courses and I see no reason why there shouldn't be some collaborative instruction material website. And with everyone editing it vetted an expert by their university department, issues of untrustworthiness don't come into play. In addition, you don't have to deal with errata you find in a lot of textbooks since those can easily be ironed out. On top of that, you can wikify many many more exercises and examples than you can fit in a book.
Announcement is a bit early, the site does not go live till 2009 !!
And what happens ? Who will write textbooks ? Well, simple : idealists. Lobbyists. Demagogues.
...
After all knowledgeable people will no longer put in the time and energy required.
So what can one expect to happen ? Textbooks, ALL textbooks will no longer be written, except in order to satisfy, not correctness of science, not ability to make students learn or understand, but
Political (or more general : ideological). Note how one of the first things Harun Yahya did to advance his intelligent design on people : make it easy, write a biology textbook for them to use. Fortunately he is a muslim, and he quickly proceeded to step 2 of "submission", his religion, he threatened violence, which makes it clear to everyone just how right he is. However : he's still making advances.
If this gets anywhere ALL textbooks will advance an ideological agenda, for advancing an ideological agenda will be the only motivation left to write textbooks, and quality of those textbooks will be secondary to how much they push a certain ideology.
In other words : if these books become widespread enough to kill the market, impartial science will no longer be taught to students.
If something like this gets combined with the government mandating certain textbooks, the disaster will be complete.
Free market in education is an oxymoron. Through public universities, land grants, tax breaks, tuition breaks, and research funding, the various levels of US government have taken all the market out of education at every level. That's why most top-tier universities charge $1000/mo. for housing, even when you're sharing one room (not one apartment, but one room) without someone else. There is no market when it comes to education.
...all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book.
The problem of multiple book editions is one reason why I now always try to make up my own questions for assignments. That plus my students get used to the type of questions I ask so the exam is not very different to what they are used to.
In fact I am convinced that the only reason the books for large 1st year courses have new editions so frequently is to change the question numbers to suppress the second hand market. In one extreme case I'd pointed out several errors in a text to the publisher and they published a new version without any of the errors fixed but the questions numbers all changed (but with the vast majority of the questions exactly the same!). Unfortunately it backfired because I was the course convener that year and we changed to a book from a different publisher...which then prompted the original book's author to contact me through the editors to fix the errors! Needles to say this interest in profit over accuracy did not leave me with a good impression!
For example, although Ben Crowell, the original poster, doesn't mention it, he himself founded The Assayer, a site that lists free books, carries reader reviews, etc.
Since 2001, I've been publishing a number of original mathematics textbooks as ebooks at the Trillia Group, all of which are DRM-free and freely licensed for student's self study. I'd hoped to license the "bits", rather than use dead trees as DRM, and have universities buy perpetual site licenses for $300. That business model hasn't worked; American universities are used to paying nothing for the textbooks they use in the classroom (even the books that the professors and teaching assistants use to teach the course are given to the universities free by the publishers), and for the most part the universities can't comprehend transferring the small cost for a site license for a text from the students to themselves.
Some academic publishers, including Cambridge University Press, allow some of their mathematics authors to distribute texts freely on the web even while the book is published in hard-cover editions. Perhaps this will become more common in the future.
Connexions from Rice University allows authors to write interconnected modules that do not necessarily follow a linear path. A student can read the material online or create a PDF. One of its main drawbacks from an author's standpoint, that input from LaTeX was not accepted, seems to be on the way to being solved. Still, it is clear that from looking at some of the better modules there that at least in the sciences and engineering, a significant amount of time and expense in writing a good textbook go into making quality illustrations, figures, and for online textbooks, animations or videos.
Liam Healy
The basic knowledge in an undergraduate engineering program, and most CS programs, is at last 100 or more years old. The fundamentals, like calculus, are much older than that again. There is no reason other than greed there cannot be a base set of books that contain the fundamental principles.
The rest is up to the professor. I did not go to university to read books. I can, and do, read at home in my own time. I went to university to learn from my professor's experiences with the material. Professors with no depth of knowledge in the material should not be teaching or relying on books to do that job for them.
My $0.02.
..don't panic
they come up with this right after i finish uni.
"To stop the terrorists."
Ben makes an excellent point in saying that "the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia," because this is true. And the Wikipedia's GFDL is incompatible with the CC By-SA license used by Wikieducator. And Wikieducator's CC By-SA license is incompatible with the CC By-NC-SA used by MIT OpenCourseWare. And MIT OCW's CC By-NC-SA is incompatible with GFDL used by Wikiversity. And Wikiversity's GFDL is incompatible with the CC By-SA licensed images on Flickr. The higher-level point is that "copyleft" clauses (which require that derivatives be licensed with ~exactly~ the same license) are the biggest legal problem with open textbooks and open educational resources generally. Every copylefted open educational resource is incompatible with every other copylefted open educational resource with a different license.
Out of pique I once did a mini personal project around my Psych 101 class.
I had stumbled onto an edition of the older textbook after having duly bought my new one.
The new one was *smaller*. That's right, the folks who published the thing decided that "Students who paid huge sums of money to go to college and buy a $88 dollar book would rather buy a 580 page book instead of the 730 page book."
Um... If our deal ol' student prefers to party and wants to skip a few pages, fine. But when I read the chapters in parallel the larger older edition had a ton of secondary explanation that I found quite valuable.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm long out of school, but I've been appalled at where I hear college textbooks have gone - $150 and more. Look at one - how much is empty margin? How much *more* work in making them is there than 20 or 30 years ago? Less, you say, since it's all done online?
Then why the increase, other than pure profit? Oh, sorry, mergers and acquisitions are *so* good for profit, sorry, I meant competition....
My ultimate example of ripoff has been, for many years, the bible (K&R): no pictures, thin book (thinner than any modern 600 page, $8-$10 paperback novel that now sell *less* copies than a textbook), AND IT WAS TYPESET BY THE AUTHORS, and 15 years ago it was nearly $40/copy.
mark
I am a co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, the company referenced in the New York Times editorial, so take any/all comments with a grain of salt - I'm hardly objective :-)
I spent 10 years at Thomson and Prentice Hall. Traditional publishers like these are caught up in changing market conditions that they are in some cases unable, and other cases unwilling, to respond to in ways that are good for customers. Instead, they've gone the opposite direction.
The internet has disrupted the business (suprise), primarily on the distribution side. It has made more "alternatives" to the publisher's new book (that's the only one they make money on) available. Three examples: (1) used books: was a cottage industry pre-internet, now it is highly organized and efficient at aggregating used books from around the country, and redistributing them efficiently to where the demand. (2) international editions: as publishers sell books overseas at lower prices in lower-priced markets (e.g. southeast Asia), those books come back into northamerica via a global gray market and displace new book sales (3) peer-to-peer networks: these have gone from posting a notice on a physical board to more sophisticated posts on things like Craig's list or dedicated trading networks.
All three phenomena displace new book sales with some other form of the book, for which the publisher does not get compensated. I'm not rendering a value judgment on this good or bad - it's just what happens in markets where there is change. The key issue is how does the industry respond? And the traditional textbook publisher has responded in a very anti-customer way, vs. innovating in their business model to take advantage of the new conditions. What have they done?
First, to compensate for the lower unit sales, they have increased prices to try and preserve revenue.
Second, they have increased the pace of new editions dramatically, with the hope of flushing all of the used and international editions of the books out of the market each time a new edition publishes.
Third, they eliminate these alternatives by trying to create what we would call in the business "unique isbns". Every book has an ISBN - when a bookstore orders books, or a student orders directly online from, say, half.com, they use the ISBN. If the publisher can create a unique ISBN at a particular university where a book has been adopted by a professor, it confuses the market - it becomes harder for the bookstore or student to find a used book, or an international edition. The two primary mechanisms for publishers to create unique ISBN's is to (a) bundle a bunch of supplements with the book, like a CD and a study guide. The resulting "bundle" has a different ISBN than the original, and thus throws off searches for used books - there will be none that show up. (b) custom books - where a publishers changes a cover, adds a syllabus from the school, takes off a chapter that the professor doesn't want, and creates a new ISBN. Again, the effect is to deaden the alternative to the new text market. Of course, customizing a book could add value to the teaching instructor and the student if it improved the book for that course, but generally that hasn't been the publisher's reason for wanting to see more custom titles.
Anyway, as you can imagine, all of this creates a negative feedback loop. As the publishers respond defensively, the drive up prices and anti-publisher anger, and then students look even harder for alternatives. It goes on...
Enter Flat World Knowledge. We just figured that it is time for a new business model that flips all of this on its head. We have a business model that is a lot more like a commercial open-source model, modified appropriately for the higher education textbook market.
"We preserve the best of the old - books by leading experts that are rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head. Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students - print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more.
Some of the most popular textboooks have been scanned onto the web already. But this doesnt cover many of them.
The publishers, for the most part, do not make a whole lot of money on any given textbook either. It's just there's a lot of time involving on making a decent textbook, and the publisher also spends a good chunk on selling it, and then the wholesaler and the bookstore take their cut. Almost nobody is getting rich.
I think the real problem is that we have a very fragmented market, with most textbook selling only a few thousand books, which makes the writing and editing very expensive
Just to give a little idea, if a book costs $100, it is sold to the wholesaler for $50, the prof takes $5 and the publisher $45; if the book sells 1000 copies, that's just $45K;