Open-Source College Textbooks Gaining Mindshare

bcrowell writes "The LA Times has a front-page article about how open-source college textbooks are starting to gain traction. One author says, 'I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200,' and describes attempts by commercial publishers to bribe faculty to use their books. The Cal State system has started a Digital Marketplace to help faculty find out about their options for free and non-free digital textbooks, and the student group PIRG has collected 1200 faculty signatures on a statement of support for open textbooks."

Comments

Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[elrous0]

...few have lived to tell the tale.

Seriously, though, you can expect a HUGE pushback on this from the publishing industry (college textbooks are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many textbooks are) and even from some professors (they write the books, after all).

And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source textbooks? Even though academics don't usually get paid particularly well for their writing, it's unlikely that many academics are going want to tackle something as big as a survey-level textbook for free (with the occasional exception like the professor in the article).

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[db32]

You can expect a huge pushback from the proprietary software industry (proprietary programs are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many programs are) and even from some programmers (they write the programs after all).

And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source programs? Even though programmers don't usually get paid particularly well for their writing, it's unlikely that many programmers are going to want to tackle something as big as the Linux kernel, Apache, or Samba for free.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[db32]

Also...can you imagine a world were college text books are clear and concise and stick to the topic at hand? You can't sell a 100 page book for $200, but if the subject can be accurately covered in 100 pages... I don't think I have taken a college course yet that has used more than maybe 1/2 of any given $100-200+ book that I had to purchase. If the professors aren't being paid by the page volume trying to sell megabooks then you could conceivably take a course that only includes the pages that you will need in the course. Modular text books so to speak. What a wonderful world that would be. Even if they get printed and you pay some amount, can you imagine a world where you don't have a back injury from carrying more than a few college books around?!

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[xutopia]

In europe some universities do without textbooks. The teacher teaches and guess what? The students have to write everything the teacher says.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[JustKidding]

I'd really hate that, because I like to read the book myself, and I don't need somebody reading it to me. Having to write everything down distracts from trying to understand what he is saying. If you go home with a bunch of notes that you don't understand, what good is that?

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[db32]

And I imagine most of the professors writing books would be employed by a university. So the situation is still pretty much the same. The programmer paycheck isn't coming from selling the software, nor would the writers paycheck come from selling the book.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[Mr. Slippery]

Incredibly few college textbooks are in libraries, the few that are are usually 5 or more years out of date.

Incredibly few subjects change enough in five years to render textbooks out of date.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[IcyHando'Death]

A better line item on one's cv would be that one's text book is being taught at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT etc. Should the big schools start moving to open text books, you can bet the academics who are giving any thought to tenure, peer recognition etc. will start contributing in a big way. In the academic world, once you have gained recognitions, the (grant) money can usually be counted on to follow.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[db32]

The "5 or more years out of date" is the exact innane argument that allows text book companies to give everyone the shaft. At the Associates or Bachelors level how many subjects are really moving that fast? Physics has remained largely unchanged, chemistry, geology, astronomy, calculus, algebra, statistics, english, speach, history, foreign languages, etc. Hell the only thing that has seemed to change that much is biology and that is legislated changes to curriculum, not scientific. Almost every subject taught at that level is mostly very old information. You typically don't get into the fast moving subjects until a bit higher in your education, and by the time you reach that level of understanding you are probably better off at a bookstore/library anyways. At the higher level in those fast moving fields it is more about active participation in expieriments and paper writing and such rather than sitting and listening to lectures and reading textbooks.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[91degrees]

So, what parts of Wikipedia do you consider to be fundamentally wrong?

It's certainly not perfect, but it's pretty good considering any fool can edit it.

A textbook would be a lot better. Only edits made my actual professors in a subject would get anywhere near the main branch.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[mtairhead]

Tell that to the professors who assign a new edition every year. Really. Tell them. Do you want names? I've got names. *Just paid $200 for a "new" Calc. book*

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[CastrTroy]

Your mistake is that you think The GIMP is supposed to compete with Photoshop. It's not. It's supposed to be a photo editor. SQLLite is a database. That doesn't mean you should go comparing it to Oracle. GIMP works perfectly well for home users who don't want to spend tons of money on a program just to take the red-eye out of a couple of photos.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[finiteSet]

why do we need 20 diffrent math books? why not have one in which allthe prof's can contribute to?

Not all variety in textbooks on the same subject is accounted for by differences in what material is left out; often authors disagree on how best to present the same core concepts. This variety is good: professors can find the best match to his or her course, and students/researchers can seek out books that resonate with their learning styles. One massive, exhaustive textbook would be a valuable resource for its completeness, but potentially a nightmare to learn from. The problem would only be exacerbated if the authors did not conform to a single standard for notation and terminology, which in itself is asking a lot.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[meringuoid]

I don't want to learn how to write scripts, or databases or anything else for that matter.

Often its easier to build a simple database to hold my 250k lines of data than it is to work across 4 tabs in an excel book.

If you're dealing with 250,000 lines of data on a regular basis you shouldn't be using Excel at all, except perhaps as somewhere to export reports to when you're finished. You should definitely learn how to build databases - and not just flat-file ones where you dump a CSV into Access because you've got more than 65,000 rows, but proper ones with multiple tables and primary keys and indexes and relationships. It's a bit of a learning curve but you'll save yourself no end of trouble.

Incidentally, I've no problem whatever with Access for this task, it's exactly what it was designed for. Splitting data across multiple tabs because there are too many rows to fit on just one, that's a sure sign you're doing it wrong.

Re:Old fashioned way

[jhfry]

This assumes that next semester they use the same book. Publishers have been known to make changes every couple of years and discontinue the older version... forcing the professors to upgrade, making the old version obsolete.

Not to mention that I have never seen a buy back for anything close the original sale price.

Re:They should be free

[elrous0]

Why is this?

Because academic texts 400 years ago were mostly written in Latin and modern students don't know Latin?

Re:This is the pushback!

[Technician]

Seriously, though, you can expect a HUGE pushback on this from the publishing industry (college textbooks are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many textbooks are) and even from some professors (they write the books, after all).

This is the pushback against high monopoly pricing. They are starting to find the breaking point in an otherwise inflexible market (Ya gotta have that book).

As the alternatives start to errode the monopoly, the publishers will adjust to find the maximum profit point, but the policies that are put in place to curb runaway prices will remain for quite some time.

Re:Old fashioned way

[CogDissident]

Sell it the next semester? But version 12 is out next semester, and they changed one entire sentence. Of course the professor won't allow your old version 11 book.

Welcome to the world of a book that is now worth 10$, not 200$.

Re:Old fashioned way

[Enderandrew]

Why print an e-book? What a monumental waste of paper and ink.

Are you aware that you can read it just fine on the computer, and with the right software you can even annotate the PDF and take notes, right on your computer. Oh, and you can search within the PDF.

Try firing up the search engine on your printed pages.

Well something has to be done

[grasshoppa]

A friend just dropped 200 bucks on a math book for a fairly low level math course. It was brand new, because of course it was a new revision for this year.

Differences? Bug fixes, essentially. So because they fixed a few of their own errors, he had to spend full price instead of the used price ( which is still a rip off ).

Couldn't he have gotten the old one online for a good price? No, because on the first day of class his professor checks to make sure he has the right book.

If none of this raises anybody's suspicions, I have a bridge for sale. cheap!

Multimedia CD

[SilentResistance]

Many of the publishers are including a multimedia CD in the back of the book, which is pretty much useless. Perhaps this is part of their excuse for increasing the cost.

This model can leave room for profit

[dmomo]

Textbooks are knowledge. Knowledge should be free. Especially in established subjects. A lot of math doesn't really change much. The textbooks shouldn't have to either. The publishers struggle to keep changing the text so old versions will become irrelevant. They add new problem sets, pretty much. It's their way of squashing the second-hand market.

Publishers should sponsor free Open-Source books. The work has already been done. Improvements and corrections will happen organically and become available as they happen. There is little cost to their upkeep and students will always have access to the most recent version and can update at any time.

Where is the money made? Invest in creating new problem sets that are companions to these open source books. Universities could take them or leave them, but since there is an actual "added value" in putting the effort in to create and verify these problem sets, I think it would be profitiable. Publish and sell these workbooks.

Make old problem sets available online for free. Heck, it'd likely be a tax deduction! Make the answers to these problem-sets available freely and in an obvious way. This will encourage schools to pay for the newest problems sets to discourage cheating.

I honestly think with this model, everyone can win.