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.
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 Well, I replied, there's several years lead time from writing to publishing a text and therefore, it's out of date before it's published.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.
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.
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Where do you get the idea that opencourseware constitutes complete course material? Opencourseware is simply a central web site for individual class web pages. Professors at any university, not just MIT, often setup web sites for their courses. On such web sites, you can usually find the course syllabus, list of homeworks, and sometimes homework solutions and occasionally lecture notes of variable quality. Does that constitute everything you need to learn the subject? Most of the time no way. I have been looking at opencourseware sites for economics courses. They still assign readings and homeworks from textbooks that everyone else uses.
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.
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
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?
It really depends on the subject and professor, but at least at undergraduate level, lectures or lecture notes alone rarely substitute a good text when one is available.
I am not really sure what you mean by "opencourseware does provide lectures". Most opencourseware class web sites provide neither lecture notes nor recorded lectures.
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.
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!
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.