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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.
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.
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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.
In a school system like grade and high school, could this not lead to cheaper operating cost for the school? Maybe this could allow higher wages to the teachers and more activities for the students to partake in. The books don't have to be e-books, but it would be nice as the books could stay at school and the students could view them online at home and or print out the portion of the book they need for that week.
What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
You can sell it the next quarter for the same price? DAMN, where do you buy books? The best I see around here is about a 10% return.
e-books don't seem problematic:
Lets assume an average of 500 pages a book (it's a bit high, but that hurts rather than helps the example).
Good color printer (can match textbook quality, or beat it) - $600
Toner with color - $200/5000pages (est, $20/book)
Paper - $20/500pages (est, $20/book)
So, $40/book. If the books are $100/ea, you come ahead $60/book.
After 10 books, assuming 3/quarter that's 3-4 quarters, you've made up your investment in the printer.
After 4 years (assuming summers off, that 12 quarters or 36 books), you are 26 books, or $1560 ahead.
Of course, you then have to subtract the cost of the ebook, if you pay for it. From the sound of it though, with an OSB, you probably /wouldn't/ have to pay for it.
You could get a nice waxjet and still do better over the time of a college degree, than buying the books retail.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Seriously, though, you can expect a HUGE pushback on this from the publishing industry (college textbooks are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many textbooks are) and even from some professors (they write the books, after all).
This is the pushback against high monopoly pricing. They are starting to find the breaking point in an otherwise inflexible market (Ya gotta have that book).
As the alternatives start to errode the monopoly, the publishers will adjust to find the maximum profit point, but the policies that are put in place to curb runaway prices will remain for quite some time.
The truth shall set you free!
You are right, but, most of the time we do not read the whole 800+ pages of a textbook. IMHO, printing out the parts that require studying would not cost much.
And, since it will also be available online, we wouldn't have to carry those oversized books everywhere.
Sell it the next semester? But version 12 is out next semester, and they changed one entire sentence. Of course the professor won't allow your old version 11 book.
Welcome to the world of a book that is now worth 10$, not 200$.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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!
In my years of college, I have never had a professor that wouldn't let you use an older edition of a textbook. I used an old version if my gen chem and organic classes and just copied the questions at the end of the chapter on a photocopier. The professor(s) knew and recommended it if you couldn't afford the newest.
Don't sell back your books at the buyback, sell them on Amazon. I sold a few mechanical engineering books for more than I bought them for, and they were 3 or 4 years old.
Gone!
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 .
My daughter has actually made money on her textbooks the last couple years. She buys them used on half.com and then sells them back to the university bookstore for more than she paid.
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.
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.
That's fair enough. But if you have too tight a hold on the market, someone else will come in and undercut you. They may even be able to come up with a business model that you simply can't adapt to. The British printing industry changed pretty drastically after the printing unions gained too much power.
People don't like paying for stuff if they don't have to. Hope you don't like your job too much. They might not be able to support that six-figure salary for much longer.
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 |
You still seem to miss the point. I suggested you shouldn't print out a textbook. You state that you need to draw reactions.
How do these two statements relate?
Either you're insisting you need to draw them directly on the textbook, or you're missing the point.
There is no need to print a 500 page textbook on paper (wasting ink and paper) just because you want to take notes on paper.
You can draw reactions in a notebook, while you keep an e-book on your computer just fine.
Conversely, many colleges and science programs ISSUE notebooks to their students. My wife just finished her biology degree (she took o-chem as well) and is trying to get into a PhD program at Creighton. My best friend is off to get his third science Masters (Atmospheric Science).
I don't believe my wife, or anyone in her class used a computer for o-chem, but she said it was pretty standard fair for most of her classes for people to take notes on the computer.
I can type much faster on PC that I can write on paper. I can revise on the PC, search on the PC, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Drawing directly on the textbook, and then taking the time to erase it all is still pretty silly when you can just draw on a notepad.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
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.
I count that as a weakness not advantage of the CS field. This is why so many CS people I have met can't seem to tell their ass from a hole in the ground. Great...so you know everything there is to know about the latest wizbang tech, but your understanding of the underlying systems is absolute garbage because they teach the latest wizbang instead of solid theory. It breeds technicians that can't troubleshoot worth a damn.
They attempt to teach the solution of the day rather than critical analysis of the problem itself. Imagine a math class that only taught how to use the popular counting technology of the day. Abacus, adding machine, calculator, computer, etc. You would be forever stuck in a cycle. Or you just teach the math and allow for new solutions to calculating said math to come about.
In the CS realm, why focus on a specific example of a buffer overflow. Buffer overflows themselves pretty much are all the same, just different specific implementations, but the problem itself is basically the same.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
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.