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."
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)
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
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
Why? I don't understand this. Does it matter from which book you learn a subject? I'm studying CS in Germany, and while I have bought some textbooks, I never *needed* to. You can get by with the library, the lecture slides, your own notes, and looking stuff up on the internet. The professors tend to hand out exercise sheets or put them on their website, so you don't depend on textbooks for that either. What makes the situation in the US so different?
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.
I am a teacher. Those "impartial" textbooks you mention are a lot of things but impartial is not one of them. Pick up a given history book and you see an awful lot of bias and authors perspective. Pick up any physics book, biology and just about any other science book and you will find that the author has imbued it with their own special brand of scientific explanation or ideas.
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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
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.