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."
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.
I had a prof a few years ago who asked to see all students who had bought his $60 textbook. He had a jar of $2 coins on his desk, and when one of those students went to see him, he would give that student one of the $2 coins. That $2 coin represented his cut of the sale. He refused to take royalties from students, as he had wrote the textbook specifically for students, not to make money. The publishing company set the price of the textbook, and it seemed the publishing company got most of the profit from it too.
---- Don't lick something unless you really mean it.
...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!