Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I prefer to buy a $200 textbook and sell it the next semester for about the same price instead of downloading the e-book and printing out the pages!
Printing an e-book (legal or illegal) is more expensive; printer cartridges are as expensive and the quality is nowhere near a real textbook.
slashdot rocks
Can some people with more experience explain? I went to uni in England. The lecturers wrote stuff up on the board/projector/used powerpoint and handed out a sheet of questions and some pages of notes each week. They suggested one to three suitable textbooks for a course, but that's as far as it went. There were usually a bunch of the library and if the lecturer was suitably ancient, then the books were out of print by a commensurate amount.
Then, there was a big old bunch of final at the end of the thirf and fourth years (first year too, but they didn't count).
I gather that in the US system, it's common to have the course structured around a 3rd party textbook. Is this correct?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Calculus hasn't changed in like what, 400 years? And yet they keep coming up with new texts all the time. Why is this?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I prefer to download it as a torrent - oh and the solution guide, too, for free.
Who prints them?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Who says you have to print it yourself? When I was in school, some professors assigned course packets that you could pick up at a local printer. They were pretty cheap and looked fine. If a whole class went in together and had them printed in bulk, that would probably drive the price down further.
Of course these were black and white packets. But if you have a field where color images are really necessary - like anatomy diagrams - you could have a supplemental online site, or have just those few pages printed in color.
What I hated about buying the $200 book was that the next semester, I could not usually sell it for anywhere near the same price, and often the course that uses it would not be offered or would change editions of the book. I lost a lot of money on textbooks. All for some 300-page color glossy monstrosity of a history text that would have been fine in black and white.
What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
The truth shall set you free!
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!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Open source texts are a great idea, but you'll need two things to make them work: (1) credentialed people willing to write and edit them, and (2) companies willing to supply a nicely bound printed version of the text for a reasonable price. Purely online texts won't cut it; reading a highly technical text on a computer screen becomes tiring very quickly.
But let's say someone does write an open source text, and someone else offers you a printed, bound version for $20. The problem is that you're now competing with gray-market textbooks intended for overseas markets. I see more and more of those in my classes every semester. Yes, you're not supposed to be able to buy them in the U.S.A., but the Internet takes care of that. Why pay $150 for a text when you can get the same text for $20? Granted, it's a soft-bound grayscale version, but that makes zero difference in the course.
That's the battle that open source texts have to fight. They're not competing with $200 hardbound traditional textbooks; they're competing with $20 softbound gray-market versions instead. I think we're going to see publishers unintentionally subsidizing the low-cost textbook model for some time to come. Eventually the gray-market growth is going to seriously impact their bottom lines, at which point they'll probably try to force faculty and universities to help them enforce their marketing rules (fat chance of that). Hopefully by that time enough open source texts will be available to fill the gaps.
In 1994 there were publishers trying to get professors to order customized textbooks. It was the same type of rip-off shown here: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/Horizon.pdf .
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.
If theres no copyright issue , most of these opensource books could be printed for $20-30 a copy for a large hardcover book. Private companies could even make a small profit selling the equivalent of "thrift editions" of these text books. They do it already for books in the public domain and furthermore most universities already have on-campus printers.
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.
Listen, I've worked for the largest educational publishers in the world both in NJ and in Australia.
Here's the deal. We sell a product with educational content, but it's a product. We do a damn good job trying to bundle subscription services with books in order to crush the use of used books. We demand that profs use the online services to assign work for credit in order to make the books essential. We put out new editions every three years and, depending on the subject, they're the same with some minor changes and a cool new cover.
Now I don't happen to think this is a crime or unethical - IT IS A BUSINESS and we want to sell books. I've made a nice six-figure salary doing it and like my job.
The older lecturers (which didnt do the lecture for the first time) usually had a script that was either published for printing cost by the faculty (something like 5â), or downloadable from the internet.
The newbies usually said something in the line of "my lecture is based on the books x,y,z".
Which might cause you to buy them, read them in a library. Or just write your own notes during the lecture.
As i have _never_ seen any need for stuff from a certain textbook that wasnt taught in the lecture.
(speaking about physics)
Ah, and yeah: After the 5th year or so, good textbooks are getting more and more rare, so you entirely depend on review papers and the lecture script.
That doesnt mean that stuff like the Ashcroft dont have their place, but they are not _required_.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Most professors at NC State during my time (1994-2002) we realistic about the books. I was there when books went from cheap to retarded in price. NCSU is currently in the works to prevent books costing over $150 from being a choice, and to prevent teachers who use books they wrote or co-wrote from charging over $50 for it. I doubt it will go through and I'm sure I'm behind the actual state of it.
The worst offender I remember was some douche bag who wrote his own chemistry manual and his WIFE (a non chemist) proof read it. The funniest thing and I couldn't find a link to the picture was the the cover had Avogadro's number on the cover... as
6.023 x 10 -23... yes I said NEGATIVE 23 in bold yellow on glossy paper.
the book had so many mistakes. I'm so glad I wasn't in that class.
I can see this devolving quickly into a war involving students, publishers, and professors on a very large scale.
How long until we see textbooks being "Licensed" instead of sold? How long until BSA-style crackdowns, complete with SWAT teams and tear gas, on secondhand textbook stores?
There's also another movement that is growing and might work for some classes. People are finding that the class 'constructing' a book for themselves and for future generations of students who will tweak it is working out really well.
When my dad was still working as a professor, he had an entire multi-shelf bookcase of nothing but free books being sent on a regular basis as samples that he could order for his class. People would send all sorts of free stuff but towards the end of his career, the free books were arriving fast and furious. If you want a free textbook, I can almost guarantee you could stop by the teacher's place at office hours and either borrow one of their likely many copies of the class book, or simply offer to buy one for cheap. (Note: this works if they didn't write the book for the class)
stuff |
NoScript + Adblock Plus + Adblock Filterset.G Autoupdater
c++;
What always bugged me about textbooks was the new revisions that always seemed to be coming out. If you can't get a math book right by revision 14, you should be fired and publically flogged for being incompetant. Shame on the profs that required the most current revision every quarter/semister, they should have their tenure stripped.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
First, the open source projects you list are great and I support them.
But your analogy sucks. It's just awful.
You're comparing open source SOFTWARE which can be whipped up on the spot by anyone with the skills and has as it's ONLY requirement that it adheres to its license , to a REFERENCE TEXT that has to be current, researched, sourced, proofread, factchecked, and edited, BEFORE IT CAN BE USED.
They have a saying for that, it's called comparing apples to oranges.
Now I honestly have no idea how well OS texts will work, but pretending they're a comparable case to software because they're both OS is laughable and wrong.
Such as connecting to a REAL database, rather than a toy one?
How about proper language support?
How about simple licensing?
PDF export?
MathML/LaTeX?
Ease of inclusion in assistive technologies (because it is a properly formed XML type)?
Most of the "advanced" features are VERY POOR imitations of the functions in a DTP program.
Too bad you got marked as flamebait.
Information and knowledge is what makes the world go round. It is no coincidence that the printing press spread literacy and knowledge and broke down centralized power -- broke up the Christian church, broke up kingdoms and leagues, spread power within countries from kings and aristocracy down to merchants and craftsmen and individual peasants and even (gasp!) women eventually.
Knowledge is power, always has been. Spreading that knowledge to all without having to pay a fortune scares politicians of all stripes around the world.
Infuriate left and right
Confucius say "knowledge want to be free, but few are willing to pay price."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Of course, no textbooks is just one reason that Europe has the finest system of higher education in the world.
What's that? They don't? Oh...
Well I guess the policies of a less successful system are ok too...
Why buy if you can download? http://www.textbooktorrents.com/
I disagree. It would be a possibility if "Professors" were some monolithic guild, but I think they are not. Whilst some might make lots of money from having their books set as required textbooks, the majority of lecturers have no incentive to set proprietary books and in fact have several incentives not to (not having to keep up to date themselves on where information in the book has shifted to this year, is one of those). Hence if a viable alternative to the expensive textbooks appears, the majority will take it once the concept has sunk in.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I agree that the proces of texts has gotten out of control. I'm also not happy that every 2 years the publishers release a "new edition" in order to trash the used market ('new editions" generally differ only in font or color schemes). Another stunt is crappy bindings designed to disintegrate after on semester thus making them worthless as 2nd hand books.
I've been hacking away at a free text for information retrieval for a couple of years. See:
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/source/ISR/isr.html
still a work in progress but it's a start.
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
I support free open source textbooks whole-heartedly. I had a class recently where the textbook was good but was targeted to the wrong audience. We only went over the first 6 chapters of it and then did lots of practical examples.
I remember taking a programming class where the Scheme book was free online but you could also buy a printed copy to make it easier to study away from a net connection. I bought the book just because and I'm glad I did but you could also get by without it.
Students also got greymarket books from india printed in black and white for dirt cheap.
as a solution:
For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time
Of course, the Educational Industrial Complex will never allow it to happen. Yes, a good university education is a good way to pass many of those certifications (including the CPA) but pretending that EVERYONE must go to college is cruel.
Dredging the memory archives for college experiences seem to bring up that a number of professors wrote their own handouts for particular subjects/topics/etc. How does this differ from putting them online for potential reuse?
It's actually a good variant on the 'publish or perish' dilemma that is forced on them. Publishing a small monograph on your speciality and putting it out there for the world to use as a teaching reference would really pump up the ol' CV.
The thing I remember most about how the textbook publishers would screw people on the so-called revisions was by changing the problem sets. You can't use an old version of the book if the problem sets are different. Or if the chapters are in a slightly different order. I had a friend who got bit by that one in an online course. Mind you, she didn't take proper steps to make sure she was using the version of the text the class needed but her 'professor' also didn't get around to grading the problem sets until almost half of them were submitted. Which is an entirely different conversation.
Back to the topic at hand. Most decent professors are doing this already in an informal manner. Formalize it, put some kind of templates out there for consistency, and have at.
The real trick is going to be getting this type of course material into the mainstream. Textbook publishers are quite aggressive about protecting that segment of their market, as we all know. Heck, selling books back is more 'by the pound' than by potential usefulness. How many landfills are full of old versions of textbooks, one must wonder?
WikiTextbook anyone?
Wikibooks has been trying to address this for a while. The problem it seems is that unlike Wikipedia, Wikibooks just doesn't get the same traffic and support.
I think a lot of professors feel that a college textbook should be written by other professors, but the fact is, for a lot of courses, it doesn't take a PhD to write a decent textbook.
I was contributing to the Wikibooks organic chemistry text while I was taking organic chemistry. I found it was actually a great study aid. You really have to understand something before you can write about it and I found that writing the text really required me to understand the topic better than I might have otherwise pushed myself.
Now, it's possible I made some errors, but being an open contribution thing like wikipedia, I assume at some point, someone will find and correct my errors. But for the most part, I wrote a lot of text I'd like to think might be helpful.
Now, whether or not professors would teach a course based on wikibooks will probably depend, to a large degree, how complete and well developed those books eventually get, but I don't see them heading that way yet.
Sadly, most of the books are a mere outline of a true textbook. For example, their Human Physiology textbook might be a total of 10 pages printed. Not even on the verge of what one would call "comprehensive".
But the idea is right. Knowledge should be free and Wikibooks has the right idea. I'm not entirely sure what they need, whether it's better PR or what, but I'd certainly like to see it get more contributions.
You think college textbooks are bad? What about public school. In that case the victim isn't a poor college student, but YOU. As a teacher I have seen the way this works. The average high school literature book is well over $60. What do you get for your money? 75% is out-of-copyright book excerpts, poems and that are all out there for free on the net. Then you have the crappy pictures and lousy activites and questions that most teachers ignore anyway. Then every five years or so we do a new textbook adoption and toss out all the old books (many of which are still in good shape).
The sad part is that public school teachers are natural open-source advocates, even if they don't know it. For years we have created and shared tests, quizzes and worksheets. I once was given a thrice-photocopied worksheet that I had created myself two years earlier. If we could harness all those good ideas and activities that are already out there and combine them using collaborative software we could wean the big publishing companies from all that public money and use it instead to buy e-book readers and other technology for kids to read the books on.
Why couldn't Apache be whipped up from nothing? just because YOU Think it's too hard? RESEARCH INTO STANDARDS, TESTING AND DEBUGGING ARE NOT REQUIRED IN ANY WAY.
So not only is that a weak ass straw man because I never said anything at all about Apache, you are factually wrong.
Meanwhile, proofreading, fact checking, source verification and editing are all neccessary.
So, again, your attempt a flawed comparison which fails badly. You seem to think that because a few OS developers are thorough and professional, that somehow makes that the norm for OS projects, when it's not only not the norm, it's not even neccessary.
If you're going to defend your "point" you need to do more than pretend a preference of a few developers is the norm, and that restating the arguments I've totally refuted somehow makes them valid.
But just to drive it home, if a 17 year old writes a great piece of code, which works perfectly but isn't debugged and hasn't been tested to standards, is there any reason the code can't be used?
You hate it, but the answer is no, it's perfectly fine to use.
Now, if that same 17 year old writes a text that hasn't been factchecked and edited could it be used?
For toilet paper maybe, but not for a class.
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, there is a chapter devoted to this very thing. The corruption of the education system by textbook companies. Interesting read.
He also writes about how the culture in Brazil made learning and teaching impossible. (Reminds me of economic figures for China. Even if the guys up top are reporting accurately, the guys below are fudging the numbers to get ahead or stay alive.)
Curious how the same professors who criticize plagiarism in student papers will be the same ones who pull this junk on textbooks and study notes.
BTW, I've found the "you must buy this for the course," is blowing smoke. I'm not sure if it is in the accreditation requirements, but there is a thing about colleges keeping the textbooks on reserve in the library. It is more convenient to have your own text. And the pre-printed study notes are there for convenience. Tell them you prefer not to. If they insist, ask for it in writing, signed by the professor.
I think that this phrase is "gaining too much mindshare" now, to the point where people use it instead of "becoming common". I vote that we give it some forgetshare.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
While I can't argue that many students are lazy, where I went to school my professors often were the authors - so I don't know what you are talking about.
Of course, my school also didn't have a summer vacation, since we had a quarter system with co-op.
I also find it very hard to believe that American students are the only lazy people around. Certainly they are lazier overall than the incredibly motivated foreign grad students that come to the US to study - but those grad students represent a vanishingly small portion of their respective countries.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If you cannot see how that can be good for education, you need to consider the question better.
Universities should do this because it would also be good for the education industry. If the students didn't have to spend so much on textbooks, the universities could squeeze more tuition out of them.
Universities are often managed as businesses. Let them act like ones and help their customers.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I was told in a graduate level course that we really needed a certain engineering book, that the professor *would* use that book. I had to wire money to England (flat out not available anywhere in the USA I could find) to get the book (this was pre-World Wide Web), and then we NEVER used it. Not once! I submitted a complaint to the dean, wrote a letter to the university paper, and even one to the Los Angeles Times, but nothing ever happened, of course. I won't mention the university. *cough*USC*cough*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and it is indeed a huge racket. We buy books by the truckload for (relatively) cheap, sell them to both bookstores and directly to students online. Buyback gives them a small fraction of it back (beer money for semester break), then the books get sold again. Lather, rinse, repeat until the book is too outdated or too ragged. We offer no kickbacks to any professor to promote any book or version. That may perhaps be done on a more local level.
There are many profs that have published their own dead tree textbooks, but they are usually only a niche market for their own school. A true open-source Etext could surely be useful, but could eventually have Wikipedia-type battles on content. All textbooks have a slant, and it could be problematic to accommodate all. Maybe you could have a filter in your reader? "Click here for the Darwinistic version, click here for Creationist version".
Keeping multiple copies of the same book in the multiple revisions is a pain. The various profs want to teach from different versions, so we must keep old versions indefinitely. Handling and tracking large amounts of books is a huge, labor-intensive problem (and we have quite a bit of automation as well).
We are dipping our toe into the Ebook waters cautiously. It makes sense in many ways as far as shipping and handling, but removes the gravy train of buyback. I wonder how many will lose their Ebook to Windows crashes (hey, this is /. we need some Anti-Windows content). They can download them again for free, providing they have proof of purchase (which may have also disappeared in the Windows crash).
I wonder that if/when the DRM gets cracked, and one kid can sell 500 copies of the textbook for $10 how that will affect the concept.
Europeans view our higher education system as the best in the world, mostly, I think, because it is.
Why would you think I wouldn't want to hear you admit that AC?
Go ahead, tell me what you think Europeans think about our higher system, which has repeatedly been rated highest in the world.
Then tell me how much you hate it, and how much you wish it weren't true.
Universities are often managed as businesses. Let them act like ones and help their customers.
That's mostly an US-ism only (although, as it happends, US-isms rub on others... ) The very concept of "education industry" makes me hurt.
That's very true in most cases, but I suspect the reason so many people are arguing otherwise here is because of the high number of people in computer related fields that visit this site. Computer books are the glaring exception to this rule. The only ones that may not change that fast are core computer science books on math theory, proofs, core algorithms and the like.
However, all the rest of the computer books which are related to actual technologies or implementations are out of date in a year or two. When I was getting my bachelor's degree I focused on information security, and that field changes incredibly rapidly. New forms of attack are discovered, DOS was hot one day and passe the next, etc. Some core concepts like encryption are similar, but even with those, changes are relatively rapid. Older books are all about DES, while new ones are about AES; older ones talk about WEP, new ones talk about WPA2; the MD5 hash algorithm is broken, and on and on.
And coding books are like that too, with a new hot language, or hot language on rails, apparently arriving every day.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I meant to imply that students, professors, and publishers would all be involved in a long and complicated fight, not that professors in general would take any particular side. It's obvious by this article alone that professors as a whole can be further broken down into a wide spectrum based upon their views on the subject.
I teach an intro to databases class, and am not requiring a textbook anymore; I provide my materials electronically for free. My goal for next semester is to edit it as a full textbook and put it on lulu
Name one "powerful feature" that MS Office has that is not in OOo.
My favorite were the 3-4 classes I took where the professor had written their own text, and obviously choose to use it for the class. They also edited it every year (the worst was one that contained several folklore tales from around the world, and he'd change out 1 or 2 stories every year) so you couldn't sell the $75 thing, and obviously couldn't buy used ones.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
I have recently received several emails from Elsevier "inviting" me to review graduate-level textbooks. I know for a fact that at least one of these books is sold to students at well over $100 a copy, and is nearly a thousand pages long. For my services as a reviewer, Elsevier is offering to pay me a "$250 honorarium". For a thousand page technical textbook. Either they don't really give a damn whether or not I give them an informed review, or they are expecting me to work for them for pennies an hour. I am not really sure what kind of moron would agree to this arrangement, but they must find takers. I have added them to my spam blacklist.
Great idea. And it seems to me that academic writing is more about prestige than money, anyway. I would think that a university would love to brag about how much its professors contributed to the textbooks that their rivals are using.
Finally, there should be a great "public good" argument in favor of this. Universities get a lot of public funding and many have huge treasure chests built up. If they help to create great textbooks that are FREELY available to public schools, that would be be a clear public service to justify taxpayer support.
No offense, but you sound like someone who doesn't have much insight into how software is developed.
"YOU Think it's too hard? RESEARCH INTO STANDARDS, TESTING AND DEBUGGING ARE NOT REQUIRED IN ANY WAY."
"With code, if it works, nothing else is necessary"
Just as you can't know if a book is factually accurate until you proofread it, you can't know if a piece of code "works" if you never tested or debugged it.
Furthermore, when it comes to writing a lot of complex software package part of making the software "work" is making it adhere to a well defined standard (because other software and/or hardware relies on your code following the spec). You simply cannot "make it work" without researching and understanding the standards. Period.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
Having spent thousands on text books myself for college (on top of an already large tuition), I applaud any effort to wrest control from the publishers. In addition to making cheaper books for students, the open-source textbooks can easily be translated and used in other countries where university-level education is harder to come by (and thus more expensive, likely with fewer options in books).
My main concern about the whole thing is the "everyone edits" model. I love Wikipedia, but this is the sort of thing where we may want to lock out some. I didn't see anything in the Times article about it, but I hope some of the wider-adopted ones do a credentials check. It's free to get in, but you have to prove you have at least a Masters or something, and then are limited in which types of books you can edit (so someone with a Masters in Finance won't be working on a biology textbook). Especially with debacles like the Kansas Board of Education, it would only take a small group of rogue individuals to mess up a textbook to make it more "Christian" or "wholesome", or even trying to change history. While likely caught before a book goes to press, some may get their stuff straight online, and so may download a bad copy.
Furthermore, while I'm glad it happened at the college level (too late to help myself, though), I see a far larger need for this at the public school level. While the students don't pay for the books themselves (per se), it's hard for many school systems to keep up-to-date textbooks or enough textbooks on hand, especially in poorer areas. Many would benefit greatly from open-source, cheap textbooks. There may be projects on this already, but I don't recall any at the moment.
Even better, scrap the large amount of text-books at the higher level and go fully digital. When I envision the Average High School in 2020, I see all students with two things: a Kindle-like device and something like the SmartQuill (I don't know a modern equivalent).
The digital textbook, something that will be along the likes of an "OLPC" for Kindle, will house all text-books, have bluetooth (or WUSB) to instantly download any notes, updates, or addendums by the teacher, and wireless networking to access school-wide announcements, discussion boards, and the like. Ideally it's in the style of a clamshell, both to protect the screen and to give it a better "book" feel. A small keyboard slides in when not in use. Bonus if it's a touchscreen or tablet, but it's not required and, at least for the moment, can't be done with eInk at the moment anyway.
The SmartQuill (or modern equivalent) will allow students to take hand-written notes if their typing isn't up to par, or if they need to draw diagrams/more complex equations. It will sync up with the digital textbook (perhaps even using a custom port that can house the pen, and sell them as a set) to make a permanent copy of the notes. These could be shared or cross-referenced in case someone misses something.
The whole setup will likely cost ~$600 student. It's about the price of four college textbooks or five-six high school text books. The convenience and re-use (you get it as a freshmen and give it back once you graduate) will likely more than make up for the initial large cost. Combine that with cheap digital text books or free open-source projects (and the Gutenberg project!) and it would be great thing for all schools to have.
I also see flying cars, but I think the Kindle/SmartQuill setup is actually feasible.
If the students didn't have to spend so much on textbooks, the universities could squeeze more tuition out of them.
Universities are often managed as businesses. Let them act like ones and help their customers.
Exactly-- I can easily imagine a member of the textbook writing university consortium charging a flat fee ($400/semester?) to all students for the extra work that some professors would be supported to do.
In your analogy, even if the software worked perfectly the first time, people would still be "testing" it by just using it. For a textbook, the review for accuracy and clarity would, presumably, be done by the professors who would be using the material. If was written perfectly clear and accurately the first time, there would be no "testing" that needed to be done, right?
You seem to be arguing that there's no way to KNOW that a text is clear and accurate without review, yet somehow it's possible to KNOW that software works as intended with no testing. I think that a) that's irrelevant and b) stupid. Of course you can't know if software works correctly without using it, and in the process, testing it.
And here, I'll sign my name to it. You're definitely an asshole.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
I think you have been reading too much of RMS's work[1]. As long as you are using the dead tree edition it is impossible to prevent students selling their books. It might be possible to stop piracy of electronic editions with a completely locked down internet.
[1]Right to Read is about e-books, remember, not paper books.
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."- Winston Churchill
"Hmm, so running the code and seeing it do the job you intended it for won't tell you it "works"?"
So if you asked me to write a random number generator for an encryption program that meets the FIPS 140-2, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules how would you or I know if the program I gave you meets the requirements without testing it?
Sure you could look at the output and it looks random, but is it "sufficiently random" to meet the requirements in the security spec? How can you tell without testing it? Moreover, how could I ever write code that meets the FIPS 140-2 requirements without every researching or understanding WHAT those requirements are? Please, enlighten this "fucking imbecile".
"So a piece of code that does everything it is supposed to with no problems, and works perfectly, but hasn't been debugged or standardized, magically doesn't work because YOU SAY SO?"
So a text book that HAPPENS to be perfectly one hundred percent factually accurate, but hasn't been proofread is suddenly inaccurate because YOU SAID SO?
No one is going to write a 100% perfectly accurate textbook without proofreading, editing and fact checking. Similarly no one is going to write a 100% perfectly accurate piece of software without testing and debugging (at least not a non-trivial piece of software). Sure it's theoretically possible that either of these two things could happen, but as a general rule they won't.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
As an instructor and, yes, a textbook writer, I can tell you that professors don't make squat doodly form textbooks (Though I'm sure there are a very few exceptions that are big money makers). And a big reason as to why they are so expensive is that the books are sold through warehouses, not form the publishers to the university bookstore. So the warehouse gets these books at $12 or so per, and then sells them at 8x-12x markup (even more if it's for law school, speaking of outrageous pricing) because there are only 6-8 weeks a year that the books can be sold. The bulk of the year is spent costing the warehouse in storage.
Authors get between ten and twenty percent of revenue from books. The obvious thing to do for Universities is to introduce a 'library access' fee, and perhaps add it to University based internet access fees. Make the fee about 10% of what it would normally cost students to buy all their books. You can license the books under the creative commons - non commercial to encourage sharing, but the revenue is really linked to University access.
Now, take a large percentage of that money and redistribute it to the authors based on how many times a book is downloaded or accessed. Now the authors get income from their work, but the books themselves are still free.
I don't feel we can ignore the element of authors being compensated for their work; but the heavy handed approach of DRM and restriction cannot be the way forward.
As a teaching member of various ivory towers, I only require one book for all of my history classes. A little ten dollar history primer from the very short introduction series. The rest of the class material comes from lectures, powerpoint, journal articles and group discussion: you know, the things that make it a learning experience apart from just reading a textbook. Of course, if students want recommendations on reading material that they can use outside of class I am happy to provide that as well.
>New ways to teach it. At a minimum, you'd hope that they'd update the examples some time over the 400 years.
I took Calculus in the 1980s and 1990s, and I'm taking it again now as a refresher before going back for a second degree.
While there may have been new ways to teach it over 400 years, I can state that there is nothing different in the last 20.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
next they might suggest you could create an open source encyclopedia
opentextbook.org
College prices are out of control, but the cost of books is not the problem. Books even at these prices are still among the most cost-effective aspect of education of any kind, including higher education. The value per dollar you get from a book even at such inflated prices is probably well worth it.
Eliminating the economic motivation for people to write books is not going to end well for any of us.
With software, the alleged answer (yes, I'm paraphrasing with a slight cynical bias injected) says that although the software is initially free, it's full of bugs and people with money will gladly pay you to maintain it for them. Even if you, unlike me, think that paradigm is approaching some kind of programmer Utopia, I don't think with books there is a similar argument. People with lots of money are not waiting to pay writers to maintain the books they give away for free. Nor are there large publishing houses looking to hire people to fix typos...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Many years ago I was taking Continuing Education at UMass Amherst. One course I wanted had a very expensive textbook ... curiously enough, written by the professor "sponsoring" the class. (The actual ContEd after-hours class was being conducted by a postgrad student.)
I complained about this self-serving BS to the administration (since I was actually staff there), but got no support whatsoever.
I was going to just cancel the class (and write a flaming letter to the editor of the local paper) ... until the postgrad student instructor contacted me (!) and let it be known that all required readings would be provided. Heh heh .. turns out HE was copying the necessary pages (and sometimes chapters) from the professor's book and giving them to us.
Worked for me, so I took the course (a good one by the way). Nothing was wrong with the professor's book, by the way: it was quite appropriate for the course material. But I don't know that it was the only textbook available, nor the best. It was the one required ... and he had a monetary interest in that. Very poor form, eh?
And even poorer form for UMass to be so abysmally disinterested in that conflict of interest.
I never forgave them that (although I'm sure they got over it).