Advice On Creating an Open Source Textbook?

Occamboy writes "I wrote a slightly successful (30,000+ copies sold) computer communications textbook a number of years back that was published via the traditional textbook publishing route. The royalties were nice, but, frankly, the bigger money came from the boost in my professional standing (I'm a practicing engineer, not a professor). I also felt bad when the publisher hiked the price dramatically every year because students were stuck once a professor adopted a text — $50 for a smallish paperback seemed very high (although I like to think what they learned was worth it!). I'm thinking of writing another textbook, this time about the practice of software engineering in critical systems, using the experience I've gained in the decades I've spent developing, and managing the development of, software-driven medical devices. Poking around on the Net, I've found several intriguing options for distributing open source texts, such as Flatworld Knowledge, Lulu, and Connexions. This concept of free or inexpensive texts intrigues me — the easy adoption and lack of price-gouging. Do any Slashdotters have experience with this new paradigm? Any suggestions or experiences to share from authors, students, and/or professors, who've written, read, or adopted open source or low-cost texts from any source?"

Comments

Nice idea

[Anonymous Coward]

As a college student, I think that's an awesome idea. I don't know anything about open source textbooks though.

Re:Nice idea

[ebusinessmedia1]

Seems like Flat World Knowledge is doing something right. They can sell a textbook for $30.00 and the authors make a profit. I've been following this company because I've been involved in the open content movement for some time. If you have a book that you want to get out to the world, and you can pass muster in reviews, as an excellent author with a strong reputation among your peers, give them a call and ask to submit a manuscript (basically, a synthesis of the book's main goals and a table of contents will get the attention you need). Also, keep in mind that FWK uses a Creative Commons CC-NC-SA license, which means that nobody can profit from your book except FWK and you. Wiki's and other open repositories are places where commercial companies can literally take your work and sell it for a price, leaving you out in the cold. Know your open licensing options before you venture further. btw, FWK is run by some very serious publishing dudes who are both out to make a profit, combined with fulfilling a social mission. They're succeeding, with more than 380 institutions of higher learning and more than 40,000 students using their books after only 5 months in the market. A friend of mine at the local university is using their Principles of Econ book this Fall. I checked it out and it's damned impressive. Watch this company; they're going places.

Two good examples (and classic)

[CDMA_Demo]

Have you looked at Wikipedia?

You can try some ideas from books already available in print as well as in electronic versions.
SICP
Stony Brook Algorithm Repository

Re:Two good examples (and classic)

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at Wikipedia?

Or, more specifically, Wikibooks?

Flexbooks

[fbsderr0r]

This site's work seems interesting. http://www.ck12.org/

Re:Flexbooks

[fbsderr0r]

In case people are too lazy to click on the link.
"CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning."

Re:Flexbooks

[Anonymous Coward]

In case people are too lazy to interpret the comment above.

FlexBooks = Open/collab web-based "textbooks" under Creative Commons Share Alike.

Re:Flexbooks

[bhiestand]

In case people are too lazy to interpret the comment above, CK-12 has free books.

Is this a Moral Conflict?

[Logibeara]

Wait I'm confused. Don't you want to make money off of this? If you're looking to to just contribute to society why not just post tutorials or build a wiki.

Re:Is this a Moral Conflict?

[Korbeau]

Do you have a tutorial about how to build a wiki? That would be very handy! :)

Re:Is this a Moral Conflict?

[Renraku]

I think he means he's tired of textbook companies charging more and more for the exact same book, simply because the students taking a course have no recourse other than to either pay up for the book or drop the class (in most cases). It's a horrible scam and if I wrote textbooks, I'd be looking for a way around it, as well.

Re:Is this a Moral Conflict?

[youn]

Or a wiki about wikis :)... wikiwiki :)

Wiki Books

[Soldats]

If you truly want to go the open source route I would strongly suggest just putting it up on wiki books. I discovered it recently by accident and have learned an enormous amount from that place, I only wish they had a detailed text on programming in assembly code.

Re:Wiki Books

[Shikaku]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm/files/

Tada!

Open Source X86 assembler, with a textbook sized help file. Check the NASM documentation tab.

I can also mention that a lot of assembly is similar, and if you can get a good handle of this one, it's mostly the same. The only difference between architectures is the instructions available and sometimes what they do.

Re:Wiki Books

[tepples]

The only difference between architectures is the instructions available and sometimes what they do.

"What they do" can vary considerably. A microcontroller based on an 8-bit 6502 core needs a really different programming style from anything i386. Some architectures (like 6502) prefer structure-of-arrays; others (like anything with a shifter in its address generator) prefer array-of-structures. (There's a difference.)

Re:Wiki Books

[Teancum]

I love NASM... I really do. What Wikibooks offers that is different is to provide a repository of several open source texts on one place, on a wide variety of topics. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/

Having written a few wikibooks myself, throwing up some documentation and trying to turn it into a real textbook are two different tasks, even though they are related. Getting good, well written content is an important step, and without the content is it hard to create the textbook. But unfortunately you are only at about the 40% mark of getting the textbook into a polished form once the content is fully written and you have created or identified all of the illustrations for that book.

Wikibooks closes the gap by another 10% with some PDF publishing tools that are being used by some of the advanced users on the site. I like to hand tweak the text myself using a word processor like Open Office, but the automated tools on Wikibooks are getting better and can use the wiki markup language more directly to get the desired results (via templates and some other cute tricks).

Re:Wiki Books

[Have Brain Will Rent]

The only difference between architectures is the instructions available and sometimes what they do.

Ummmm, yeah... different instructions and different results... that would generally cover it. The thing is there can be quite significant differences between architectures. CISC vs RISC is very different. Stack oriented vs register oriented is a big difference. And so on. Now compared to a language like, say, Scheme, all machine architectures and their assembler languages might look almost the same but compared to each other the architectures and languages are very, very different.

As for the parent question a lot can be learned by selecting an easy to understand architecture, e.g., 68K and reading through the vendor's user manuals (usually cheap or free) for the chip and the assembly language.

Interesting

[Rehnberg]

Perhaps the new model could be something like what Cory Doctorow has done, in that textbook authors publish at physical book and, at the same time, release a free digital download of the textbook. That way, professors and students who felt like they needed the full versions could buy it, while those who don't need the printed version and/or can't afford it could simply download it. Of course, there might have to be incentives to buy the physical book, but, in my opinion, they should be limited to what is absolutely necessary to ensure that the publisher and author can actually make money; the free version should still be substantive.

Re:Interesting

[calmofthestorm]

Many of us like online textbooks because they're free, but I still see quite a few of my classmates purchasing books (SiCP is a great example). Given that ebooks are available free whether or not legally, this may not be a bad idea.

HOWEVER: I imagine doing the online route will make it far harder to get published.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the new model could be something like what Cory Doctorow has done

While not a bad idea, per se, I would strongly advise anyone against any behavior or course of action which may result in an increased similarity to Cory Doctorow.

Re:Interesting

[mad flyer]

Seconded...

First you do like Doctorow... then Paris Hilton... and after... who know how low you will go...

Re:Interesting

[Unoti]

Wait, what's wrong with Cory Doctorow?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there might have to be incentives to buy the physical book..

I think the biggest incentive is to be able to read a book while taking a shit. I've read all of the CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE books many times over while on the crapper. I once had a bad experience with my laptop (you don't want to know) so I have shied away from using one of those on the crapper.

Re:Interesting

[julesh]

Perhaps the new model could be something like what Cory Doctorow has done, in that textbook authors publish at physical book and, at the same time, release a free digital download of the textbook.

I've seen this applied to reference works as well, and see no reason it couldn't work with textbooks too. The lesson to learn from how Cory does it, though, is one that isn't at first obvious: talk to the big publishers first, and tell them exactly what you want to do. Your book is likely to see a lot more circulation with the reputation (and marketing budget) of a big name publisher behind it than if, say, you decided to print & distribute it yourself via lulu. There's a reason the world hasn't gone entirely self-published and that is that the publisher's reputation is important in the decisions people make to buy books.

Re:Interesting

[julesh]

HOWEVER: I imagine doing the online route will make it far harder to get published.

Yes. You'll have to find a sympathetic publisher, and while some do exist in the field of fiction publishing (Baen and Tor are two that spring to mind, both having published books while giving away free downloads of them, but I think there are others too) and others in references works (ISTR that a lot of the Coriolis open-source titles were distributed like this, and I've seen some of the Addison Wesley Professional titles with text distributed on their authors' own web sites too, e.g. xUnit Test Patterns), I don't know of any in academic publishing. But, that said, the fact that the model has been successfully used in other fields might convince a publisher who hasn't done it yet to try it.

The important thing, though, is to talk to publishers before releasing your text. A publisher is much more likely to want to get involved if they at least feel like they're in control of the release. Publishers rarely touch works that have been released to the public before they get hold of them. The few exceptions are almost universally extremely popular books (e.g. Tom Clancy's first novel which was originally published by a specialist military publisher before being picked up by a mainstream press), and you don't want to count on your book being that popular.

Re:Interesting

[PCM2]

The thing about fiction publishing is that it's an entertainment medium. It's a basic fact of human nature that neither war nor economic depression nor famine nor "growing up" will ever eliminate the human desire for entertainment. Can you say the same of elementary algebra?

Give a man a fish, and he'll feed himself for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll never need to buy an illustrated guide to fishing.

In a sense, what Tor and Baen are doing is comparable to what Google is doing with software. Google can afford to build an innovative browser and give it away for free -- source and all -- because Google isn't in the business of making money off software. Google is in the business of making money off the Web.

Give a man a book, and he'll keep himself warm for an hour. Teach a man to read -- teach him the JOY of reading -- and you've built a market for books.

Textbooks aren't about the joy of reading. In fact, some of the most awful reads I've ever endured have been in textbooks. Textbooks are designed to accompany classroom discussion, experiments, homework assignments, and all of the rest of the rigmarole that goes along with coursework. As such, many are practically illegible. Most people I know wouldn't willingly pay a dime for a textbook -- save that they're forced to.

Re:Interesting

[sgarg]

One buys physical books because they are easy to read - I still find paper much easier to read than on screen, though e-book readers could change that. Today e-book readers are way too expensive. Add to that the fact that I can make notes in the margin (though in some cases it could be too small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_last_theorem) and books make worth buying. But, the digital ones make sense - many are easily available, they are searchable etc. One nice model is bundling the physical and digital version together. The physical book should actually cost less than or equal to what would be spent in printing out the book and binding it - there should eb an advantage to the economies of scale. A book that needs colour should have it in the publisher printed version - that is one advantage - colour laser printers are still probhibitively expensive.

Scribd seems to allow people to make money off digital books. Possibly docstoc too ...

Re:Interesting

[IainCartwright]

...he named his child Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow?

Re:Interesting

[bcrowell]

Your examples of Baen and Tor are a little off the mark, since those are fiction publishing houses. Generally fiction publishers are never interested in reading submissions that have already been published. (Yes, there are tons of exceptions, but that's the general rule.) In academia, it's quite common for authors to release their textbooks for free online, and then get a contract with a publisher. Fifty years ago, the professor would run off copies of his book on purple mimeograph paper and test drive it with his students, debug it, and only then get it published; putting the book online for free is the modern (and ethical) way to do the same thing. I have never, ever heard of a textbook publisher having an issue with this. What does tend to happen a lot is that once the publisher is bringing out the book in print, they demand that the author take down the free download. If you look though the catalog of free books in my sig, there are probably several hundred books that used to be free, but are now marked as broken links; almost always, the situation is the one I've just described. There are publishers who are more open-minded. One example that springs to mind is that Benjamin Cummings published Sean Carroll's general relativity book, but an earlier form of the book is still available free online (without, e.g., the improved versions of the figures that the publisher produced for their edition). The basic problem is that textbook prices are wildly inflated, and resulting extremely lucrative (and exploitative) setup is not sustainable unless the publisher has a perfect iron grip over the book.

unfortunately...

[Odinlake]

...I suspect many professors still feel a textbook lacks legitimacy unless it's hard cover, thick and there is a substantial price tag connected to it. I say this so as to suggest that "free" might mean it won't be as widely adopted as the authors first one.

Re:unfortunately...

[spankyofoz]

I have to agree with this. Too many people still stick to the old adage "you get what you pay for", and are wary of free things.

Plus I have a large suspicion that there is some sort of kickback for professors enforcing textbook requirements. It might be a bit of a conspiracy theory, but it all fits together too well...

Re:unfortunately...

[calmofthestorm]

One of my professors would give us seven page numbers for every reference to a page he made and every problem he assigned...one for each of the seven versions of the course text. Obviously this is more than a little effort to put in, and we appreciated it. This guy did NOT like the textbook racket.

Re:unfortunately...

[PeterBrett]

...I suspect many professors still feel a textbook lacks legitimacy unless it's hard cover, thick and there is a substantial price tag connected to it. I say this so as to suggest that "free" might mean it won't be as widely adopted as the authors first one.

That's fine -- just take a leaf out of David MacKay's book (ha). His textbook (Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms) is available online for free, but is also published by Cambridge University Press, one of the world's top academic publishers.

It's also one of their best-sellers.

(I own a copy of the above textbook; it's excellently written, typeset and bound. One of the best books I own!)

Re:unfortunately...

[Shikaku]

One of my class textbooks was this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm/files/nasm%20documentation/2.07/nasm-2.07-xdoc.zip/download

Then again, my CS department had a Linux lab.

Re:unfortunately...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tilings and Patterns is my favourite book. Beautifully typeset and bound with excellent illustrations it's also very interesting. And expensive. But you can't have everything.

I've only read the online version of MacKay's book. I'll have to buy a copy.

Re:unfortunately...

[db32]

That is a tough one, especially in the field he is discussing. I would routinely gripe about the cost of books and the instructors would simply throw their hands up and say "nothing we can do". However, in my technology classes it was different. I got one of my books used for $5. I figured that couldn't possibly be correct so I called the instructor to make sure this was the right book. He explained that he read through the new version, didn't find anything significantly different, and decided to go with the old version to save the students some money. I repeat....he deliberately chose the previous version that was being sold at toilet paper prices so we could avoid the whole new book extortion scheme. It has been my tech instructors that have been much more apt to try and keep students out of the text book racket. Even if it makes it more difficult to sell the books at the end of the semester the money saved over buying new or even "current" used is worth it. Personally, I keep all my books anyways, I refuse to rent college books for that much...if I have to pay I am going to keep them for reference material. Even if the book is so bad that I can't use it for reference I keep it to show others "look at the shit these idiots wrote".

I suspect it will be in the more new/tech areas that are going to lead the way on changing how this model of business works.

Re:unfortunately...

[domatic]

Even if the book is so bad that I can't use it for reference I keep it to show others "look at the shit these idiots wrote".

You'd be amazed how moving a time or three will motivate you to prune the personal library. I vastly prefer reading from a dead tree than even the best ebook reader but on the other hand I'll like the ebooks a lot more when a couple of flash cards in my pocket is the library.

Re:unfortunately...

[bcrowell]

Plus I have a large suspicion that there is some sort of kickback for professors enforcing textbook requirements.

Evidence, please? I'm a college professor, and I've never been offered a kickback from a publisher.

From Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I've written an open Math Textbook (old version here, email me for working draft, email address in book) and Electricity textbook (but it's somewhat neglected and I'm not yet pleased with it...).

In any case, I've come up with a few things on this topic:

- Commercial textbooks seem to try to justify their extortionate price by being longer than they need to be. This is not helpful and in fact your students will appreciate brevity (they don't want to read through a page to get something that could be explained in a paragraph). If you feel something really needs that sort of explanation, then do so (maybe try to give a brief explanation first?) but keep in mind that students will have to carry the book around.

- There is no reason to put questions in the book. Put them in a seperate book, or as seperate pages on line.

- Make sure that students know they can download a copy on line (having an electronic copy means that they don't have to carry things back and forth). Make the electronic version as friendly as possible, preferably with internal hyperlinking (this is easy with LaTeX, just use the hyperref package and a lot will be done automagically).

Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[ceoyoyo]

Do you want to write a free textbook, manage an open source textbook project or host/start a wiki textbook?

If you want to write a free textbook, go for it. There are several examples you can find, some by pretty big names.

If you want to manage an open source textbook project be warned that if you want a professor to use it you're going to have to assume the role of editor and put up your reputation to vouch for whatever goes into it.

If you want to start a wiki textbook project, there's no shortage of wiki sites, but nobody is going to use it in an official capacity. Just like Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia, wiki texts don't either.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[calmofthestorm]

I don't know, my professors regularly referenced wikipedia as supplemental reading. The more open minded/younger generations are starting to accept that it's a damn good reference at an encyclopedia level. Of course any kind of real paper requires a lot more depth, but it's a good place to start.

I've also had ones who just stubbornly ruled it out and refused to discuss it. But at least they had the common sense to make this policy clear in advance, rather than marking students down for it.

Yes, there is trash on wikipedia. If you can't separate bullshit from truth with reasonable accuracy, you have bigger problems than your coursework.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[ceoyoyo]

As supplemental reading it's a gutsy move. As the primary resource for the class (ie the textbook), it would be either irresponsible or a nightmare of extra work.

The professor is responsible for what he teaches you. With a properly edited textbook the editors, authors and publisher (if there is one) take responsibility for the accuracy of contents. With a wiki there's no one to do that. So to use a wiki textbook the professor really should have edited it himself, which is a lot of work.

As for a reference in a paper, unless you're writing about social interaction on the Internet and using Wikipedia as an example, referencing it is not acceptable above about fourth grade (and neither is a traditional encyclopedia). It's a great place to start, and even better now that they've started encouraging inclusion of actual references in the articles, but it doesn't cut it as a reference in a formal paper.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[shmlco]

Paul Revere's famous "Midnight Ride" occurred on the night of April 18/April 19, 1774, when he and William Davies were instructed by Dr. Joseph Warren to ride from Boston to Arlington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the movements of the British Army...

Fine. Except it was 1775, not 1774, he rode to Lexington, not Arlington, and it's William Dawes, not Davies.

But if any of the above were represented on Wikipedia as fact, how would you--not knowing any better--separate out the "bullshit"?

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[rtfa-troll]

Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica. This is even taking into account the risk of vandalism. I don't care about the detail; there seem to be ways of counting which make Wikipedia win and ways that make Britannica win; what matters is that this means that statistically, a fact in Wikipedia is much more likely to be true than not. If you wouldn't worry when using a different Encyclopaedia, then you shouldn't worry when using Wikipedia.

Now, if you care about a fact enough that you are worried even in this situation. A; typical example where this might be true is when involved in academic studies; then you need to check the sources of the fact. This is where Wikipedia's citation policy is a killer. Whilst you should still check the fact in multiple sources, knowing the original source tends to make it much easier to be clear when a fact is wrong. Why was it wrong? What is the original source of the misunderstanding etc. etc.

The only thing to be aware of in Wikipedia is that it's more likely that a fact is maliciously and deliberately wrong. In this case, it helps to check the history of the fact and see who added it; again something not possible in Britannica. If that doesn't matter / isn't likely for the fact you are interested in then again you just go back to statistics, which are in your favour.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[calmofthestorm]

I'm glad my professors didn't see it that way. To be fair, I usually used wikipeida as you suggest: read it, read the references, cite them, but I cite wikipedia as well and always did fine.

It was most useful in science, math, and engineering classes for quick fact lookups in class.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[calmofthestorm]

I'd argue that's not bullshit, it's a minor mistake. My understanding of history is shattered if I mistake that one year difference. If that one fact were important enough to matter, surely one would read more than one source anyway, and Wikipedia at that!

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[lennier]

"But if any of the above were represented on Wikipedia as fact, how would you--not knowing any better--separate out the "bullshit"?"

Would you be in a position where knowing such a fine level of detail would matter?

If you are, then it's a fair bet that you will have consulted multiple references.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many reliable sources, why use an unreliable one?

I was never allowed to cite wikipedia, even when taking some gen eds in a community college.

Our school had so many resources, access to so many databases, why would I waste my time on something like that?

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[BluBrick]

Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica.

The problem with Wikipedia in academia is not the accuracy per se, it's that references on Wikipedia are not static and therefore are unverifiable. References in the Encyclopedia Brittanica - even a 50 year old edition - are. If you try to verify today what I quoted from Wikipedia last week, it may well have changed since then. If I quote a specific edition of the Brittanica as my reference for a fact, I may be taken to task for using an outdated reference, but at least my research will be reproducible because that edition will always carry the same content.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[TheCowSaysMooNotBoo]

And if i remember correctly there isn't any "fact" checking in the references either. I can make a page saying I rule the universe and wikipedia will gladly accept it as a source (unless, of course, someone removes it as an unreliable source - but if you're learning about the subject you don't know what is reliable/unreliable ...)

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm. Using Wikipedia's citation tools does produce a reference to the state of the article at a given point in time, doesn't it?

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[St.Creed]

True. That's why you should be using statistics to your advantage (and check the talk-pages!). Well-read, often-quoted topics are viewed by more eyes and less likely to contain unverified nonsense. Not a guarantee, but I've seen some pretty controversial topics (try the scientology pages) that actually give out pretty reliable information, despite numerous edit-wars. On the other side of the spectrum there are the pages that are written by one person in an obscure topic, that nooone can verify. These should be treated with wariness.

By the way: from your statement it looks as if you've never made such a page. Why not go ahead and try it? I've just edited a few pages and got fast and good feedback. I'm pretty sure your page wouldn't last too long.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[St.Creed]

The one thing wikipedia has been teaching the world, which is in my opinion the most valuable contribution to the world it has made, is that *no* text is reliable just because it says so. The "failures" of wikipedia have taught us more than even its huge success as knowledge repository.

We have a whole generation of people growing up who get taught, in a way that hasn't been done before, that you should always check your references, investigate the statements. They used to be able to say "it's in the encyclopedia brittannica" and get away with it. But nowadays most teachers understand that saying "it's on wikipedia" just isn't good enough, so they get taught to check more references than just one. In effect, wikipedia has been teaching the world to "think critically". That, if nothing else, is a huge contribution to society.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[TheCowSaysMooNotBoo]

True about the not lasting long, but mine was a bad example: I think if I made a page about some obscure subject (that was Wikipedia-viable) the people coming to the wikipedia page would receive wrong information, and since it takes a long time (I think) for the editors to notice & fix the obscure pages the damage may have already been done.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[ceoyoyo]

If you confirm any encyclopedia citations with a second source it's okay, but that's pretty redundant.

I'm pretty sure it was grade four when they weaned us off the encyclopedia. All encyclopedia cites were required to be backed up by a non-encyclopedia citation. In grade five we just dropped the redundant citation.

If you're writing a scientific paper for publication the only acceptable citation is really a peer reviewed paper. Even textbooks are out, except under special circumstances.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[maxume]

No, the problem is that it is an encyclopedia. References to specific versions are essentially trivial:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Page_history&oldid=308799187#Linking_to_a_specific_version_of_a_page

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[gtbritishskull]

Are you still in elementary school? What are you doing research for where it is acceptable to quote an encyclopedia? By the time I was in middle school I was always told to go to primary sources.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[gtbritishskull]

But you are supposed to link to your sources. If I were using wikipedia to do research, I would go to your page, check its credibility, and then decide whether to use it or not. Are you saying that google is an unacceptable tool to use when you are doing research? Because a google search shows me tons of pages that are probably completely wrong. At least with wikipedia a little bit of the crap is filtered out. All wikipedia does is points you in the right (or occasionally wrong) direction. It is up to you to verify the facts before you present them as such.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[gtbritishskull]

When you do a google search for Paul Revere, how do you, "not knowing any better", separate out the bullshit? Wikipedia is designed to make it easier to get an overview of a subject and then follow the primary sources to check facts. I think that anyone who has used a google search to do research should have their research invalidated, because by your argument it is much worse than wikipedia, and for some reason they will follow the first link and assume that page is written by god.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[tlhIngan]

Paul Revere's famous "Midnight Ride" occurred on the night of April 18/April 19, 1774, when he and William Davies were instructed by Dr. Joseph Warren to ride from Boston to Arlington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the movements of the British Army...

Fine. Except it was 1775, not 1774, he rode to Lexington, not Arlington, and it's William Dawes, not Davies.

But if any of the above were represented on Wikipedia as fact, how would you--not knowing any better--separate out the "bullshit"?

That's what references are for, and why Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, as comprehensive as it is, really shouldn't be used as source material. There may be errors in that article (this applies to any encyclopedia, even ones like Britannica). Use it for background on your paper/research/whatever, and use the handy-dandy citations as source materials in the quest for more source material. Like using GOogle as a companion research tool - Wikipedia to get a background and learn any jargon that may aid your ability to find source material.

Even in classes where Wikipedia is allowed, doesn't mean you should blindly copy whatever it says. You should treat it as if every prof says "you cannot use Wikipedia". Oh yes, you'll use it, but you won't cite it (which is fine, since the fact will be cited for you, and rather than cite Wikipedia, you'd cite the original source - the Wikipedia citation would be redundant).

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[petermgreen]

Wikipedia does keep full history so you can cite a particular revision should you wish.

Not that I'd particulally reccomend citing either of them as anything more than sources of background reading.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[bcrowell]

Lots of incorrect statements here.

If you want to manage an open source textbook project be warned that if you want a professor to use it you're going to have to assume the role of editor and put up your reputation to vouch for whatever goes into it.

Open-source is not the same thing as multi-author. My own physics textbooks are open-source, but I'm the only author. Open-source, in the context of a textbook, simply means it's under an appropriate copyleft license (e.g., CC-BY-SA), and it's in an open, editable format (e.g., latex). It does not mean that anyone who wants to can alter the contents of my books.

If you want to start a wiki textbook project, there's no shortage of wiki sites, but nobody is going to use it in an official capacity. Just like Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia, wiki texts don't either.

Totally wrong. This is exactly what ck12 and curriki are doing. Yes, their books have been adopted by schools. You seem to be imagining that all wikis are publicly editable. Just because something is a wiki, that doesn't mean that it's editable by anyone. For instance, the books on ck12 can't be edited unless you ask for an account and convince them you know enough to make a positive contribution. Also, "Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia" is a correct statement if you're talking about citing references. An equally true statement is "textbooks don't fly in academia" -- that is, nobody cites a textbook as a reference.

Re:Make sure you're clear on what you want to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Each semester my students in an Educational Foundations course write their own official textbook using Wikibooks.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Education_and_Instructional_Assessment/Edition_4

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Foundations_and_Assessment_of_Education

The students are required to write it, read it and rate it. While, it's true, there are errors and some students write lousy articles, the pedagogy of having students write their own text far surpasses that of reading an established text. Think synthesis and evaluation vs comprehension on Bloom's taxonomy.

To boot, we've conducted quasi-experimental study for two semesters (we've been doing it for ten) and found that students learn the course material just as well using their own text as students who used a traditional expert-written textbook.

Perhaps O'Reilly's Open Books

[drgould]

I understand O'Reilly publishes a number of books under "various forms of 'open' copyright".

O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.

Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright.

Re:Perhaps O'Reilly's Open Books

[StatusWoe]

O'Reilly publishes the Subversion book, and it's also available free online (and as a full PDF)

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

This might be an interesting avenue.

RTFS

[stephanruby]

RTFS. Read The F'cking Summary.

The royalties were nice, but, frankly, the bigger money came from the boost in my professional standing (I'm a practicing engineer, not a professor).

Re:RTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there are some people who just can't fathom not "monetizing" everything they do to the point that they can't even imagine other people ever thinking about it.

Re:RTFS

[JosKarith]

Hi, welcome to SlashDot. You must be new here.

Experiences with Lulu

[HockeyPuck]

So I work for a "big router company", and like other companies of similar size it has it's own publishing arm. After writing a number of books which were published either for free on the company's website or via their publishing arm. I decided that I had enough of the Editor's, and self proclaimed techwriters. Now my co-author and I wrote all the material and we handpicked our technical reviewers. We have close ties to the techwriters who author manuals/users guides etc. So finding a reviewer of grammar/style wasn't that hard.

In the end we decided to give away soft copies via download, but if the customer wanted a printed copy then we charged them market value for the book. We decided upon lulu because honestly it was an easy to use interface, they were responsive via email, though I don't believe you can call them up and speak with them. In the end we basically shipped them a .pdf, and then ordered a proof copy to make sure all the graphics/fonts came out as we expected.

We purchased an ISBN from them, and now you can find it on amazon/barnes and noble etc. Our audience is pretty specific, so getting word of our book is pretty easy. No need to pay for marketing, and "big router company" doesn't really help us. Just word of mouth of sales, tech support folks and visiting clients/customers.

I definitely like how I can create multiple versions, review copies etc. I'm sure that there are many other lulu.com type companies.

I would recommend Lulu.

Re:Experiences with Lulu

[bcrowell]

For a catalog of free and/or open-source books, see my sig. I've written some free physics textbooks, and have been fairly successful getting them adopted at colleges and high schools (scroll down on that page for a list of adoptions).

In my experience, college profs and high school teachers tend to be pretty open-minded about adopting free books. I haven't seen much evidence of any stigma associated with the fact that they're not published by a big publishing house. High school teachers at public high schools generally don't get the freedom to choose a book that hasn't been approved by the state bureaucracy, but teachers at Catholic schools and charter schools do. Most of my high school adoptions have been from private religious schools.

Promoting a self-published book is always difficult. For me it's been mostly word of mouth, but I've also paid for ads in The Physics Teacher now and then.

I started out by doing the order fulfillment myself. That was nuts. After doing that for years, I was extremely happy to have it done by lulu -- no fuss, no muss. Pros and cons of lulu:

• They do the order fulfillment. That means I don't need a business license or a merchant credit card account anymore. I don't need to do sales tax returns anymore. I don't have to extend credit to customers, or nag the flaky ones to pay their bills. I don't have to worry about going on vacation in the summer when orders are going to come in. I don't have to lay out capital to print hundreds of books at a time, or fill up all the closets in my house with them.
• Lulu, unlike almost all vanity presses, offers an option where you don't pay them any money initially. That option is good. Use it. People who pay a vanity press to publish their book are mostly fooling themselves. Money is supposed to flow to the author; if it flows the other way it's generally a scam. With lulu's free option you don't get an ISBN. Don't worry about it. I've never had a college bookstore or high school get upset because there was no ISBN for the book. They handle instructors' course packs, etc., that don't have ISBNs, and they're used to it.
• Support is more or less nonexistent. They have forums, and the other users on those forums are often very nice, but the chances of getting a helpful response from lulu staff are pretty low in my experience.
• Don't use their USPS Media Mail shipping options, and make sure to warn your customers not to use it. The books will arrive six weeks late and damaged.
• I have had lots of hassles with PDFs. Often a PDF will print fine for a year, but then one day someone will place an order, the particular subcontractor that's supposed to print the books for that region will get an error, and then I have a problem. The customer gets an email saying the order couldn't be fulfilled. I get an email saying there was an error, but not what the error was. This always seems to happen when the order is some gigantic order from a big university, and I'm out of town. Not fun. To maximize your chances that the pdf will work, and work reliably, make sure that no fonts are subsetted, and that 100% of fonts are embedded. If you're generating them with ghostcript (or one of the many other pieces of software that use gs under the hood), make sure it's a recent version of gs.

It sounds like you're planning on selling to colleges. Don't underestimate the insane cheapness of impoverished college students. If your book costs significantly more in print than it would cost them to download it and print it out at Kinko's, they'll download it and print it. No, it's not logical to save thirty-seven cents by printing the book out instead of buying a nice, bound copy. Yes, they'll do it anyway. For this reason, do not expect to make any money on this project. Do it if it makes you happy. Do it if it scratches your itch. The good thing about lulu is that if you use their free option, you're guaranteed not to *lose* any money.

Re:Experiences with Lulu

[Aussie_Scribe]

> I decided that I had enough of the Editor's, and self proclaimed techwriters. Forgive me but perhaps ditching the editors was unwise. In only one sentence you've: 1. used an unnecessary capital; 2. used an unnecessary apostrophe; 3. used an unnecessary comma; and 4. omitted a hyphen. Seriously: editors add value.

Re:Experiences with Lulu

[Anonymous Coward]

So I work for a "big router company",

What is the deal with starting sentences, and in fact entire thoughts, with "so"? Prior to about a year ago, I only heard the word connecting two thoughts, where the second thought followed from the first. Now people are starting off with the "so" as if there is a phantom idea that is preceding their first statement. I do not remember hearing this up until very recently. What does the word add to the writing or speaking?

So finding a reviewer of grammar/style wasn't that hard.

This is how I am used to the word "so" being used.

Re:Experiences with Lulu

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be new here...

Hate to say it but...

[s0litaire]

...Have you thought of Amazons POD (Print on Demand) service? Think for a basic book, all you need is 2 pdf's

1) The book itself

2) A front / spine/ Back images for the cover.

You upload it to Amazons servers and set a price (Think Amazon charges a fee for inital setup).

Then list it on Amazon and they are printed as required.

Re:Hate to say it but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy asks for help with an open source textbook and you mention Amazon?

Sheesh..!

Re:Hate to say it but...

[Garwulf]

I hate to say it, but that's a really bad idea. I'm afraid that as a publisher who has to deal with PoD printers, I know something of the reputation that Amazon's PoD service has - and it's terrible. The company is called Booksurge, and they are known for off-center covers, missing pages, and in some cases typos that aren't in the PDF they were sent.

If you want a good company to work with for that, use Lightning Source. You need a business number, but they're professional, they have worldwide distribution (they're owned by Ingram), and their quality control is superb. And, you just have to send them two PDFs.

Re:Hate to say it but...

[Myopic]

This is off topic (but please don't mod me down for it). Years ago the internet nerds decided to boycott Amazon, so I did that along with the rest of the nerds, or so I thought. Years have passed, and I never heard that we were dropping the boycott, but nobody seems to be miffed at Amazon anymore. Did I miss a news story about how Amazon made amends and was forgiven?

Re:Hate to say it but...

[bcrowell]

Slightly different take here.

IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.

Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments...

Re:Hate to say it but...

[Garwulf]

"IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.

"Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments..."

Um...I'm afraid you're wrong there on a number of levels.

First, you're right about where money should flow, but it's important to keep in mind that Lightning Source is a printer, not a publisher. They provide printing services to publishers (hence the requirement for a business number). I don't know if Booksurge/Amazon is the same, but they are certainly targeting the small publisher market.

Second, Lightning Source handles order fulfillment. They're owned by Ingram, which is the largest wholesaler in the American market, and so all books published by Lightning Source go directly into the Ingram supply chain, as well as a couple of other wholesalers. The only time I have to handle my own order fulfillment is when I get a direct order, in which case I place the order, and Lightning Source ships it and bills me for it.

There is a company named Bookmobile that does short run printings and does not do order fulfillment - you may be thinking of them. But Lightning Source does enough that I really can just upload the books and just let the money come rolling in.

Re:Hate to say it but...

[bcrowell]

I see -- thanks for the info about lightning source. I didn't know they did retail order fulfillment.

First, you're right about where money should flow, but it's important to keep in mind that Lightning Source is a printer, not a publisher. They provide printing services to publishers (hence the requirement for a business number). I don't know if Booksurge/Amazon is the same, but they are certainly targeting the small publisher market.

I think we're starting to see a blurring of the lines between publishers and printers. Lulu, for example, does many of the things traditionally associated with the publisher (production, storage, distribution, retail sales, disbursing royalties to the author, a tiny bit of promotion), but doesn't do a lot of the other things a publisher would traditionally do (editorial, art, serious promotion).

Re:Hate to say it but...

[Garwulf]

Yeah, Lulu is sort of on the mid-line between a printer and a vanity press. It strikes me that they're mainly for the self-publishing crowd.

I'd put them more on the vanity press side, I guess. At least they aren't Authorhouse.

Flossmanuals.net

[thatkid_2002]

If you look at the FLOSS Manuals website you can read a number of Open Source manuals for Open Source software in both HTML and PDF form (IIRC) and if you want a hard copy it redirects you to lulu.com where you purchase a hard copy. It seems to work well for those guys.
You could probably email them and ask them about their experiences.

wiki, wiki, wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikis are great for collaboration, and can be exported into LaTeX.

MJD of Perl fame wrote a great book, Higher Order Perlwhich is open source and has interesting community-based achievements, such as the most recent edition having been made of edits contributed on a bug tracker, iirc, among other such notable achievements.

Re:wiki, wiki, wiki

[geminidomino]

Not to mention being an interesting, if somewhat esoteric, read.

ask a Prof

[Tumbleweed]

I was reading about MIT OpenCourseWare in the latest Popular Science, and the references they made about the costs not being totally free because of textbooks, etc. really intrigued me - perhaps you could contact an MIT professor who teaches a course that your proposed textbook would be appropriate for, and ask for advice on what would help open-minded professors use open source/free textbooks.

I think an education-minded billionaire would be very helpful in providing some free textbook and other materials to go along with this fantastic trend of free online education.

Re:ask a Prof

[cpghost]

I think an education-minded billionaire would be very helpful in providing some free textbook and other materials to go along with this fantastic trend of free online education.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts: Bill Gates would only offer free online education in Silverlight format.

Re:Rule #1

[maxwell demon]

According to the summary, he does, as witnessed by the fact that he already wrote a successful closed-source book about the topic.

The (free) text I set for a class once...

[spinach and eggs]

... was "Dive Into Python" (http://www.diveintopython.org/). I don't remember how I came across the book in the first place, but I did, I set and used the text for the course, and the publishers probably got some sales out of it, too, from those who like to have a bound copy for the bookcase. So perhaps you could have a look at that book's publisher for another alternative.

Put it on the web for free AND print it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eight years ago I had a sequence of classes in computational theory (Lisp basis) taught out of a book that was Free online and available in printed form. You can get by with the free online version but the ability to thumb through the dead tree version was helpful at times.

Some students want a hardcopy (not everyone likes reading from the computer or has multiple computers to work with) and some a free web page so do both.

Talk to Bruce Perens

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be able to publish it as part of his Bruce Perens' Open Source Series.

A long time coming

[pspahn]

Since ~1996 I have had the idea of public, as well as other forms of education, adopting electronic formats for their required texts. Sure, then it would have been a little ahead of its time, but now...

With the ever growing budget deficits facing many school districts, as well as the prevalence of laptops in education down to the high school level, isn't it time we looked at distributing text in a pdf or other format?

The costs of textbooks for 11th and 12th grade combined easily surpass the cost of a new netbook for the student to view these files on.

As an educator I would rather the district cut costs by finding more efficient means of delivering the education rather than eliminate integral parts of that same education, such as PE, arts, and technology.

My experience (Objective C for Apple)

[kanweg]

With help from Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin I wrote a tutorial on programming in Object-C, aimed at absolute newbies. It was released as a PDF and a great success. Over 200k copies were downloaded by people interested in programming for the Apple Macintosh (or perhaps iPhone). You can find it here:

http://www.cocoalab.com/?q=becomeanxcoder

It was translated by volunteers in several other languages, amongst which Chinese and Arabic. Cool!

Bert

Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

I have never heard of any prof ever getting a kickback from a publisher and I have certainly never been offered one myself....and I ever were offered one I guarantee I'd pursue the appropriate action against the offending publisher. Frankly I, and a lot of my colleagues, find the frequent new editions where nothing but the problem numbers change to be a huge rip-off for the students and we would love to do something about it.

I'm certainly not suspicious of "free" books...but have you ever actually looked at the texts which are available? at least for physics? I have, and while I am not a fan of the big, glossy 1st year physics text books they are far superior to the free offerings available. The free books are generally unedited, full of mistakes, have few to no chapter problems or worked examples and/or are written by an author trying to push some bizarre methodology or point of view. They are simply are not suitable as a course text. They are not, at all, like Open Source software where the code is generally of higher quality than the commercial stuff just less polished.

Perhaps if things were to somehow get organized like an Open Source project then things would be a lot better since it would allow faculty members to write a chunk of the book and the central maintainer could then act as editor. However the number of people with adequate expert knowledge, plus an Open source-like attitude plus the inclination and time to write such a chunk is low enough that without a very high profile it would be hard to achieve critical mass...and without critical mass how do you achieve a high profile?

If you have any suggestions I would be very interested to hear them....

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[digitig]

I'm certainly not suspicious of "free" books...but have you ever actually looked at the texts which are available? at least for physics? I have, and while I am not a fan of the big, glossy 1st year physics text books they are far superior to the free offerings available.

That doesn't seem to be what California found.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my physics professors used a free textbook from http://www.lightandmatter.com -- I found it to be better than the Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday/Resnick. I thought the free textbook was much better quality than any Physics textbook I've had to pay for and I continued to use the other free textbooks in the series as a supplement to my following core Physics courses.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[geminidomino]

For what it's worth, I would not be a fan of a purely electronic textbook. Electronic resources are great, but having a written reference on the side is still very useful - if only because you may need to see the reference while looking at stuff on your screen.

The lazy ones, though, make that pay off for them. It becomes the equivalent of the gamestop exclusive DLC, to damage the used book market. When you get one who actually tries to REQUIRE it (I did), you either rebuy the book brand new (eating the cost of the used one) or drop the section/class.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[jellomizer]

Are you sure?

Kickbacks are often modified quite carefully so it doesn't seem like you may be getting one.
Publishing Company Sponsored events, where you are "networking" with other professors from different colleges to help others write their books for them, (or some research fill a paragraph get you name in the book, and some royalties) Chances are you will be pushing your book to your class. Or carefully presented to show you how to use all the features of the publishing company. Work Books, CDROMs, Web Site... Anything to make you want to get the Deluxe version, which hard to sell back as used.

The New trend of customized text books. where you can get mixed version of the book (only the chapters you need) and because you are making a mix you get royalties from the sales.

Free Textbooks as samples or as thanks for having your classes use them, (you can use such textbooks to donate to needy students)

Professors are excellent saps for such tricks or marketing. Because they have reached the peak of educational achievements many of them have got the Ego where they really think they are that much smarter then the rest of the population, even though most of them just got there threw hard work, not superior intellect. So they think they are immune to such tricks. Secondly a professors pay isn't really that great so incentives that could make them a little more money or get their name out a bit, they just jump to it. "I Can Do No Wrong" + "I need money/recognition" = "Publishing Company Profit"

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you knew anything about the California textbook adoption process, you wouldn't be making the implied argumentum ad verecundiam.

The problem is that open source works very, very well for problems with boundary conditions: it works, or it doesn't work. Open source doesn't work so well for any sphere in which there are controversies or sincere differences of opinion (which is why, despite that oft-cited-Nature-study-with-serious-methodological problems [for goodness' sake, they padded and cropped the articles to make them the same size, and in several cases, I know as an expert that things they cited as errors in Britannica and correct in Wikipedia were the reverse], Wikipedia sucks).

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[domatic]

Professors are excellent saps for such tricks or marketing. Because they have reached the peak of educational achievements many of them have got the Ego where they really think they are that much smarter then the rest of the population, even though most of them just got there threw hard work, not superior intellect. So they think they are immune to such tricks.

I won't argue your greater idea "Professors think they are immune to being marketing saps." But I will note that working hard for a long period of time at an intellectual endeavor (getting a physics doctorate say) will make you smarter at least in some areas. Even older brains have some plasticity and constant practice at math and difficult physics ideas will enhance the wiring in the parts of the brain that process such ideas and information associated with such ideas. The short short version is: hard work can make you smarter.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[bigbigbison]

I've been a grad student for a number of years and I've never heard of publishing company sponsored events. I'm in the humanities though in a field where anthologies or single author books are most often used and not textbooks though.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[penrodyn]

I quite agree with you. Most open source text books are inadequate compared to pay for books for all the reasons you outlined. I write software and a lot of prose for a living and I have no doubt in my mind that software writing is far far easier than writing a good text book. If you think about it, software can be logically correct but can at the same time be sloppily written while still useful. Indentation doesn't have to be perfect or even present, variables names don't have to be spelt correctly, even algorithms don't have to be perfect and source organization can be haphazard so long as the original author knows what's going on. A book on the other hand not only has to be logically correct, but also look good (check out the CK-12 open source books that California has chosen, the layout is pretty bad), has to be clearly organized and above all read well (with out spelling or grammatical errors). A book also has far more facets to it including text, figures, problems sets (plus answers!), index etc. Anyone who has tried or has written a substantial book will know how difficult and time consuming it is to produce a good text book.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[asylumx]

Electronic resources are great, but having a written reference on the side is still very useful - if only because you may need to see the reference while looking at stuff on your screen.

There is also much to be said for being able to pencil in quick notes directly in their context, IMO.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Teancum]

I hope that at least for a college-level physics textbook that you have at least considered http://lightandmatter.com/ ?

This text is already the primary introductory physics text that includes chapter problems and has been vetted over the course of several years of experience in actual classroom usage at several colleges. Besides, I happen to like the principle author of the book as well, who has considerable experience in open source textbook publishing.

They don't have to be full of mistakes, and the problem is that most of the content you are referring to is usually the equivalent of a very early preliminary draft that hasn't had the polish that a good editor can provide. Getting the synergy together for putting this level of polish on open source texts is a hard thing to do, as that implies you have a whole community of folks with similar interests that want to see that the content gets the polish that it deserves. This is something that has happened with open source software projects, but seems to be lacking for textbook collaboration.

One additional problem I've seen with the on-line textbook collaborators is that egos get in the way of getting the kind of cooperation that is commonly found with software collaboration. Those with the experience and knowledge that could put the kind of professional spit and polish on open source textbooks usually try to go off on their own and set up a competing website or small group that often isn't a large enough group to get anything of substance accomplished. In the case of Ben Crowell (from Light and Matter), he stayed focused on one topic and aimed to maintain the quality on that topic. Such an effort takes years, and perhaps even decades to accomplish, and certainly writing a book is a much more complex task than trying to write a simple article like something found on Wikipedia.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[jellomizer]

It is not their smarts but their Ego which is dangerous. After getting that paper that calls them Dr. their Ego can take over and make the brain more rigid again. Living life in a filtered environment where they are the expert, and people will not disagree with them, that is unless they with peers of their field.

They feel that they are better then everyone else, and in turn loose a lot of their humanity.

Now when people know this has happened to a person, it gets easy to manipulate them as all you need to do is stroke their Ego in the right way.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

Thanks for the tip and I'm glad you liked the book but, after just a brief reading, it fails my "Newton's Law test". Stating and explaining Newton's laws of motion is something every first year physics text must do and so it gives a good, single topic to quickly compare books. Here is approximately what the laws should be:

• A body will remain at rest or in motion with a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force.
• When a force acts on a body it produces an acceleration in the direction of the force which is proportional to the magnitude of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body.
• For every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction.

What this book has is:

• If the total force on an object is zero, its center(sic) of mass continues in the same state of motion.
• a=Ftotal/m, where m is an object's mass, Ftotal is the sum of the forces acting on it, and a is the acceleration of the object's center of mass.
• ??? They seem to have forgotten this one...oh they put it in a separate chapter for some reason here it is: "Forces occur in equal and opposite pairs: whenever object A exerts a force on object B, object B must also be exerting a force on object A. The two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction."

Newton's first law is not too shabby - expect that "state of motion" is not defined until the next paragraph and why introduce something new when you do not need to?
Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional". They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text)...but that is because they don't cover vectors until AFTER Newton's laws!
Newton't third law is again ok, just very wordy and should be alongside the other laws.
Finally they spend an inordinate amount of time explaining what force is not such as "a force is not energy" which is great only they have not actually explained what energy is yet...in fact that chapter is entirely missing as is the one on momentum. In fact these are my biggest gripes: half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion) and the ordering of the chapters is insane. How can you have the chapter on vectors AFTER the chapters on velocity and forces when these are vectors?

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

The New trend of customized text books. where you can get mixed version of the book (only the chapters you need) and because you are making a mix you get royalties from the sales.

I looked into that once but never saw any mention of getting royalties. In fact the reason I looked into it was to see if we could strip out some of the book sections that we did not want to save the students money but the costs of producing the custom version meant that the savings were practically nothing.

Free Textbooks as samples or as thanks for having your classes use them

I've only ever got free textbooks to evaluate the text or, if we adopt a text, to work from to set reading assignments etc. If the publisher did not provide it for free then the University would be purchasing it for me to use and the cost would be passed on through tuition. Either way it will still be "free" for me since I need it to do my job as a professor so why would that make me more likely to pick one publisher over any other? In fact I would actually PREFER an electronic text since then I woud not have to either lug around or store these insanely large text books.

Professors are excellent saps for such tricks or marketing.

I would agree with that in principle but not for the reasons you give. My reasoning is simply that we are in an academic environment and not a business one. Hence we don't know all the latest marketing tricks because we have not been exposed to them. This is part of the reason why I am always on edge talking to marketing reps from publishers because I'm never entirely sure whether I am being spun the latest line or actually being presented with a product that will benefit my students.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[bcrowell]

Hi -- I'm the author of the book. Of course, de gustibus non est disputandum, but re "half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion)," those topics are in volume 2. It's a 6-book series.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[dunng808]

I have been working on a related project for roughly ten years and made very little progress. The obstacles to free textbooks are many, and include:

        o Author reluctance due to
                - the dream of publishing a hit and making money
                - fear that associating with such an endeavor (e.g., Wikipedia) will damage their reputation (corollary: a successful publication improves reputation)
                - lack of skill in creating on-line content

        o Difficulty in finding credible reviewers willing to work for free

        o A belief held by consumers that something expensive is worth more (corollary: people measure success by money raised and spent rather than money saved)

        o Marketing costs

        o The belief that information printed on paper is better than when displayed on screen
                - easier to read
                - easier to highlight
                - easier to carry
                - better tactile experience (page flipping)
                - better retention

        o Broad-based doubts and fears about using computers in the classroom
                - money could be better spent elsewhere
                - lack of tech support
                - the computer becomes a distraction
                - disruptions caused by viruses and malware

I encourage anyone considering such an endeavor to explore ways that an automated text can provide a better experience than a printed book. Avoid the trap of publishing presentation slides or simply the text that would be used in a traditional book. Currently I am exploring Squeak, an open-source implementation of Smalltalk with rich media capabilities, specifically the use of bookmorphs and stackmorphs as lively containers for engaging interactive content. These two morphic classes draw inspiration from the old Macintosh HyperCard program.

I am undecided on the issue of true open-source content. Currently I lean towards a published version which can be used freely to create derivative works, while the original author's work cannot be altered. I am not a big fan of anonymous work, nor of communal products. Yet I totally support FOSS.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

Thanks for pointing that out - I had missed that Newtonian Mechanics was not all contained in the Newtonian Physics book. As you say that is a taste issue and people will vary.

However I think the point about the chapter ordering is not taste but pedagogical in nature. Why do you not cover vectors at the start of the book? I don't see how you gain anything from putting them in so late and you end up loosing a lot of understanding when you are covering Newton's laws as well as basic kinematics. The same goes for saying things like "force is not energy". If you teach them what energy is then they will know it is not a force. Pointing out common errors is one thing but they do need to know what the two quantities actually are first.

All that being said I would definitely say that yours is the best "open source" physics book that I have seen. I don't think it is as good as the best commercial offerings (in my opinion) but it is better than some of them and it is definitely cheaper than all of them! I'll certainly point my students to your site though since tastes vary and they may like your text better than the course one.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[LihTox]

Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional".

Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units: we don't write that E is proportional to mc^2, that velocity is proportional to displacement over time, and so forth. To do so would be madness, and I've never seen a physics textbook that insisted upon it.

They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text)
At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion." Starting with one-dimensional motion is hardly controversial; the textbook by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker does so as well.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[bcrowell]

Re energy, they come in with an informal concept of energy (food calories, etc.), and my experience is that many of their conceptual errors with force occur because they subconsciously associate that informal energy concept with the symbol F.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units

...and when stating an equation that would be correct. However Newton's second law is usually written down in words and then converted into an equation since it aids comprehension. Also, since a common problem with US texts is the presence of old medieval units, there is actually a need to state that this works for SI units only.

At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion."

Exactly and why is that? Newton's second law has no such restriction and if you teach vectors beforehand there is no need for it. Even when I first learnt NII at school the direction was mentioned. This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[Roger W Moore]

Strange. I've rarely had them confuse force and energy - it is power and energy that seems to be the hardest to get right. You still haven't explained the choice of vector chapter ordering though.i

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[j-beda]

The confusion between force and energy is common (doesn't the Force-concept-inventory have a bunch of questions on this type of thing? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_inventory but maybe it doesn't touch on energy at all and my memory is a bit bad) but it is often hidden within student's mixing of the concepts and the language at the same time. Both forces and energies have the ability to "make things move" in some sense, so it isn't a completely idiotic idea to mix them together in one's mental models.

My favourite quote from Physics Education Research is from Aarons who in the intro to "A guide to Introductory Physics Teaching" said something like "Research has firmly established that an engaging, exciting, well given lecture has little to no impact on student outcomes - which is not to say your lectures should be dull and boring." In my opinion, the text for a course has a pretty small overall impact on the learning of the student (which of course is no reason to choose a "bad" text) so choosing an affordable text that is acceptable over a slightly "better" text that is not affordable might make sense. The Light and Matter texts were at one point available as LaTeX files which I have in the past used to create supplementary texts with only a few of the L&M chapters to give a different approach for a few second year courses that have a review of 1st year materials - and the problems are nice too.

Re:Speaking as a professor...

[j-beda]

"This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it."

I don't really have an opinion on this particular issue, but it is very true that we often, often, often ignore important parts of things we are teaching in order to assist the learning of something. From their first year at school, we essentially tell kids "What you learned last year is not completely correct - now we will work on a understanding of the concepts." Deciding which bits to "put off till later" and deciding how to avoid those bits with the minimum amount of future confusion and the maximum amount of "foundation laying" is one of the challenges of education.

open-licensed distribution

[drDugan]

LegalTorrents does hosting and distribution of open licensed content:

see http://www.legaltorrents.com/books

A mature example

[Anonymous Coward]

Tony Kuphaldt has created a series of electrical and electronic textbooks suitable for use at a technical college. The project has developed over (afaict) about nine years.

I first stumbled over into the books through an educational website that doesn't seem to exist anymore. The textbooks seem to be a stand-alone project but a google search shows that they can be downloaded from about a zillion other sites. The books are open source and there are many contributors.

In particular, check out the contributor guidelines. That's where you will see how Tony manages the process.

http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/index.htm

Google OpenCourseWare

[Anonymous Coward]

I am certain that any professor who is publicly advocating OpenCourseWare would love to review your book for class use.

Sell it on Kindle

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sell it on Kindle for $9.95. Students can read it on the Kindle reader, or with a free reader for their iPhone or iPod touch. $9.95 isn't free, but it's pretty cheap for a text book.

Re:Sell it on Kindle

[nathanlang]

More students would have laptops than a Kindle (or even an iPhone), so a pdf format eBook would reach more students. Or, try uploading and selling on one of the non-proprietary multi-format eBook stores - you're not limiting your market to one hardware platform then.

Re:Sell it on Kindle

[cpghost]

Since Amazon doesn't want to sell the Kindle in the EU (e.g. unavailable in Germany), publishing ONLY on Kindle would unnecessarily restrict the exposure of your book.

Freeload Press

[ZPWeeks]

Thanks to some very sane authors in my Finance department, I took a class using a free text from Freeload Press. They manage to turn revenue by putting ads in the DRM-free PDF files. Other good benefits are very quick error corrections, and students have the option to order an ad-free printed copy for a very sane price (around $30-40). My guess is that authors still get paid. http://www.freeloadpress.com/index.html (Normally I'm vehemently anti-advertising but as a college student, I'd *much* rather support an advertising business model than the current textbook industry. Yuck!)

Done and succesfull

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a hybrid method that was applied by some professors in Food Science. (Steffe and Daubert)
They published a limited number of books at a decent price (about $50) and at the same time the book is available for free on the web.
Frreeman Press was the name of the company, my hunch is that those guys set it up.

You maybe able to talk to them (both of them nice guys) and get an opinion of someone that has already experience on the field.

Hard copy (e.g. 50 $) + free online version

[kusmin]

What about something like this:

***Network Theory Ltd - publishing free software manuals **
http://www.network-theory.co.uk/

Before buying a hard copy of one of the book they published (GNU Octave Manual) I consulted free online version of the book many times. I understand that your book is not a software manual. But maybe there are other publishers who do it like Network Theory Ltd.

Been in a class with an open source book

[der Nome]

I took a class last semester where we used Robert Beezer's a first course in Linear Algebra which is available for download. We had the university printing center print each student a copy of 500+ page book. Each student paid $20 for printing (compared to a new traditional book which would cost around $180). The book went over fairly well and my program is now considering using open source again in the future.

Lulu is EXPENSIVE.

[Futurepower(R)]

Wow! Lulu is expensive, in my opinion. For a 300-page hardbound book, 1000 copies: "Manufacturing cost: $72,000.00 Per unit cost: $72.00".

Re:Lulu is EXPENSIVE.

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

That's full-color inside printing ... even if 290 pages are only black and white, the printer is expensive to use to get the other 10 pages in color.

If you go to black and white inside pages, the price drops considerably:
1000 = Manufacturing cost: $20,500.00 Per unit cost: $20.50
And even a single copy run = Manufacturing cost: $22.50

Re:Lulu is EXPENSIVE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try 'The Lightning Source'
You control the content, format and pricing

They just print it up one or more at a time as ordered by your students/readers

Re:Lulu is EXPENSIVE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does this number comes from ????? A hardcover book of 300 pages (8.25"x10.75") costs $22.50. The same book in Paperback costs $13.00.

If you buy 1000 copies, the per unit cost is $20.50.

Re:Lulu is EXPENSIVE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeed, color, even a dozen pages among a few hundred, will seriously elevate the cost.

I don't have much experience with textbooks per se, but was seriously discouraged from writing one by a colleague who told me publishers put you through hell with their demands. And the publishers regard these as a cash cow, so the better the deal you can carve with them at the outset...well, that's as good as it will get. Ever. Wiley, Elsevier, etc. etc.--my contacts with them have NOT been positive.

In the art/design world, a run of 3,000 copies at a retail of $50/each WITH color would be considered typical, probably close to bottom line. Less than 3,000 copies, prices escalate considerably. Sadly, we are also dealing with the death of the University Press as we have known it, and they have traditionally published most of these smaller (3-5k) print runs.

BEWARE WORK-FOR-HIRE CONTRACTS! and sorry about the caps :]

Speaking as a professor...

[bradley13]

Speaking as a professor, I absolutely detest the practice of issuing new editions every year to screw the students. It is (a) never clear what has changed, (b) there is no reason students shouldn't be able pass on their used textbooks if they no longer want them, and (c) if you need translations, they are always a year or so behind, meaning that editions do not match across languages.

So, as a potential customer of textbooks, what is important?

• The book must come up in Google. I find books by searching both in general and specifically within publishers sites. The best textbook in the world is useless if I never find out about it. Unfortunately, this means that the known academic publishers have a big advantage.
• Content, content, content. I want real, useful, practical content. Stay relevant, cut the fluff. Take an example from the operating systems text by Tanenbaum: No student now alive gives a damn how the IBM 360 used to work. Heck, I cut my teeth programming an IBM 360, and I don't care how it worked. So why does he keep blathering on about it?
• Price. I dislike the feeling that my students are getting ripped off. For my sins, I am teaching a new intro-to-CS course for business students next semester. The only half-way-decent textbook I could find is a 300 page, overly fluffy paperback - and it costs 50 Euros (that's about 75 bucks). Oh, yes, and there is a new edition out this year, great...
• Online resources. I mention this almost as a negative point. Many publishers make much ado about online resources. It is nice to provide source-code and basic illustrations in electronic form. Perhaps solutions to some exercises. Anything else is useless - for example, I cannot imagine any competent professor using pre-prepared lecture slides.

For what it's worth, I would not be a fan of a purely electronic textbook. Electronic resources are great, but having a written reference on the side is still very useful - if only because you may need to see the reference while looking at stuff on your screen.

Printers are cheap. Self-publishing is expensive?

[Futurepower(R)]

Gorham Printing quote, 300 pages, 1,000 copies, paperback: "Your Price: $5,130.00 ($5.13 per book)".

Anyone have experience with book printers?

The "self-publishers" I found in a Google search all seem to take advantage of the desire of authors to see a paper copy of their book.

Is Lulu 10 times more expensive?

[Futurepower(R)]

Look at the comments above:

Lulu is expensive [lulu.com], in my opinion. For a 300-page hardbound book, 1000 copies: "Manufacturing cost: $72,000.00 Per unit cost: $72.00".

Gorham Printing quote [gorhamprinting.com], 300 pages, 1,000 copies, paperback: "Your Price: $5,130.00 ($5.13 per book)".

Re:Is Lulu 10 times more expensive?

[maxume]

So why not compare Lulu's paperback prices to Gorham's paperback prices? Like here:

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1340373&cid=29117021

(I see that you have replied there, so this post is mostly for other readers)

I've got some advice for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop using, so many, unnecessary commas,

FLOSSManuals

[delire]

Look no further than http://flossmanuals.net. Check out the GNU/Linux Command Line manual, the new Ogg/Theora manual and also the "How To Bypass Internet Censorship" manuals for examples of what their platform is capable of (alongside a sense of the energy of the FM community).

Note there are three core publishing options: HTML, PDF and print-on-demand.

Wikiversity

[G3ckoG33k]

Check out http://en.wikiversity.org/

"Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities."

Re:Lulu is EXPENSIVE- NOT.

[mrjb]

That's because you've chosen to make it expensive.

Unit costs for a 300 page paperback on publisher-grade paper, black and white contents, full-color cover, perfect bound is only 7 dollars for a single unit, or 6.50 for 1000- and that's for on-demand printing.

POD printing

[a302b]

What about "Print on Demand" (POD) books? Just offer a PDF on your website and have a link for a POD book for those students that prefer a physical book. There are many, many POD publishers out there. and most are pretty good/indistinguishable from "regular" printing. And if you use Amazon's POD publisher, Booksurge, you automatically get listed with them. To me this seems like a "no fail" system that provides both free (ebook) and physical (POD) versions of your book while side-stepping an outdated publishing industry.

Re:POD printing

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the links he gave on summary are already Print On Demand services.

Re:POD printing

[julesh]

There are many, many POD publishers out there. and most are pretty good/indistinguishable from "regular" printing [...] To me this seems like a "no fail" system that provides both free (ebook) and physical (POD) versions of your book while side-stepping an outdated publishing industry.

No, they aren't, although it isn't in the quality of the printed copy you'll notice the difference: it's the price tag that'll do it. POD printing costs many, many times more than regular printing does. To pick a random example, a 400 page softcover "perfect-bound" trade-paperback size book from a traditional printer in standard publisher-sized print runs would probably cost about $3 US per book to print and bind. From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.

But this ignores the primary problem with your suggestion, which is that POD publishers don't provide the same service that traditional publishers do. Publishers provide editing services that ensure the content of the book is as good as possible. They provide marketing services to make sure potential customers know about the book. And most importantly, they provide a limited range of books that the buyer knows they can have confidence in because they know that the publisher has chosen to publish the book because it's a high quality book, written by a reliable author, and they are confident in the correctness of its content. If you buy a textbook from an author you've never heard of published by Lulu, well good luck. You have a 50% chance of it being absolute rubbish. Probably higher.

Why would you say the publishing industry is outdated? They know the market they're in, and unlike many other industries you'll find they're actually pretty proactive about changing to follow the times. Try talking to a publishing professional some time and you'll realise that POD (at least in its present form) cannot replace the existing infrastructure of publishers, because publishers provide an entirely different service to POD.

Re:POD printing

[julesh]

I said:

From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.

Having just priced one up in Lulu, it seems they want $8.50 for it.

The trouble is not in publishing but in marketing

[mrjb]

I've published a book ('Growing Better Software') through Lulu. It was straightforward to get my book 'out there' on all popular book sites, while maintaining ownership and thus control over pricing etc.

Getting the book published is the easy part. The hard part is to get the world to know that the book is out there and not to spend more on the marketing than the sales will earn you- unless it is more important to you that the book is out there than to earn back the time you invested in it.

Did your 'traditional publisher' help you out with the marketing? Over 30000 copies sold sounds like a decent marketing job to me. You may be able to get a higher percentage in royalties on a self-publishing site, but you're likely to be mostly on your own for the marketing. Sure, Lulu offers marketing services- but they consider a book a best-seller when it sells 500 copies.

Reality Check

[calspach]

Sadly, I don't think you will get the kind of exposure you want if you go this route. There may be some professors that start using this since they already know you, but it's a paradox. If something is free, it's not worth as much as something that costs $50. Most of your professors and colleges will opt for the $50 book simply because it must contain better information than a free download.

Re:Reality Check

[jemmons]

If something is free, it's not worth as much as something that costs $50. Most of your professors and colleges will opt for the $50 book simply because it must contain better information than a free download.

This is, of course, a fallacy, albeit one that is very commonly accepted by professors and encouraged by publishers. Of course, the only way to break out of this cycle is to get people to see through the false assumptions and take a leap of faith, and hope others follow suit.

One of the things we've done with Connexions is to introduce a feature we call lenses, which is a sort of post-publication review process that allows individuals or organizations to endorse content that's already freely available. In short, it gives you the confidence that someone has signed off on the quality just as an editor would with a traditional textbook (which, it should be pointed out, is not guaranteed to be accurate, effective, or even worth its weight in salt). Will this catch on? Time will tell, but I think we're definitely moving towards a model where we get more authors involved in the process who are interested more in gaining recognition and contributing to their fields than in a measly royalty check. A globally-accessed open education site like Connexions or some of the others mentioned here offers many authors - especially young authors or those and those shut out of the traditional model - an audience of potentially millions of readers who can access content through Google rather than a few hundred who were forced to shell out $100 for a book they really didn't want to buy in the first place.

connexions

[rickyars]

i was one of several undergrads working with rich baranuik on connexions back in 2000. i don't know how much has changed since then, but the philosophy behind the idea really intrigued me.

the goal is to create stand-alone "modules" of information, typically short and on a single topic. these are then placed in a repository from which anyone else can mix and match to create their own course. another appealing aspect was that courses no longer had to be linear, but could bounce around as the instructor saw fit.

connexions also works to separate content from design, which allows an author to focus on content creation without having to worry about presentation.

Confusion.

[Futurepower(R)]

I find the Lulu web site confusing. Thanks for the information.

Bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

The "history" tab is not there just to look pretty. So long as you include a "date accessed" as part of your reference to a Wikipedia article, then one can check the exact text of the article at that time. On the other hand, if you quote *any* encyclopaedia for a fact, then you are not writing to academic standards anyway.

Harsh Reality

[egcagrac0]

You enjoyed a significant change in your professional standing by being the author of a very small, very expensive book.

How would giving away a webpage or PDF help you?

Heinlein pointed out - you've got to make the rubes pay, or they won't listen.

Re:Speaking as a another professor...

[justanothermathnerd]

I have to agree that much of the open source material that's available is either not very well done or more commonly the author has recovered the copyright on a published book after it went out of print and then released it into the wild.

On the other hand, I've been through the process of publishing a textbook with one of the mainline commercial publishers, and frankly I can't see where they added any value- the copy editor was a grad student in English who had trouble editing the text because she couldn't figure out which technical terms were nouns and which were verbs, the type setters took our perfectly servicable LaTeX and broke things (like splitting the "dx" at the end of an integral over two lines!), and the subcontractor who made the CD-Rom for the book produced it with a file system that only supported 8.3 filenames after agreeing that it should have Joliet and Rockridge extensions for longer file names.

CK-12 Foundation

[Brian Edwards]

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.

Re:Printers are cheap. Self-publishing is expensiv

[Teancum]

My experience with book publishing is that, in general, a 10x increase in printing volume causes a 2x increase in costs. The reverse is also true in general. On demand printing of PDF files can skew that for smaller print runs, but that is a good general rule.

As for comparisons between one printer and another, there are issues like paper quality, colors used, printing processes, and even technical quality of the printer themselves.

The technology does exist for printing large volumes of books on a one-off basis (aka a printer that can print many books at the same time, but the contents of the book is completely different for each individual copy). This is mostly done at the moment with the mail-print industry (aka the companies who print out invoices/bills for people like utility companies and credit card services). In theory, a one-off on demand 300 page paperback book could be printed for about $5 per copy, including postage. Potentially less but postage costs start to eat into the figure. The problem is that trying to get a publishing sales team together to be able to feed such a monster printing press is not a trivial thing.

For this reason, partner with Open Courseware

[hessian]

I can't speak in a universal context, but if this were my project:

I would partner with an open courseware "course" or professor.

That way, free content would promote the free context I was giving away.

As far as getting the book out there... a website with a PDF, man.

I would make it free, and make it clear that any edits by the user community would constitute a fork -- that way, you're not responsible for the kid who photoshops "Eat Dicks" into the background of Diagram 3.2-7

Funny this should come up

[jdbannon]

I just put up a website (www.openyourtextbook.com) to sell printed copies of CC / open textbooks last night. Did this largely because of the CK12 books. I don't have very much content there yet, but you /can/ buy the CK12 textbooks, and I'm starting go through some of the other open textbook organizations looking for good content. The website needs a lot of work to be scalable, but before I do that work, I want to make sure it needs to be scalable. If you have a good, free textbook, I'd love to make it available. I can produce them for much less than the options discussed above. The books will be soft cover with B&W interiors.

Working makes you smarter

[qbzzt]

The short short version is: hard work can make you smarter.

Smarter in that particular domain. Outside of business administration, how many professors spent a lot of time thinking about marketing tricks?

Real World Haskell & Hg Book

[jetxee]

Please check out such books as Mercurial: The Definitive Guide and Real World Haskell. They were freely available when being written and remain such, but in the same time both books were published as usual (on paper) by O'Reilly:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596800673/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514983/

The source code used to create the books is also available. So you may use the same work flow.

More on Connexions ...

[jemmons]

Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about Connexions. I haven't had time to review all of the contents as this has turned into a really deep discussion, but I can tell you that it addresses several of the concerns here: searchable by Google, free access for students, print-on-demand options as well as online access, and completely open (CC-by) licensing of content. For those arguing against giving away content because of lack of ROI, I recently posted a blog post describing several ways that authors can actually benefit from using a site like Connexions (or, to be fair, any widely-viewed open education site). My role is as the primary author and community support person, as well as a "salesman" of sorts, so if you have any questions or want help getting started with authoring, feel free to give me a shout at cnx at cnx.org and I'll be more than happy to assist.

Regardless of which site or service you end up going with (all have their own pros/cons and licensing philosophies, so it's certainly not one-size-fits-all), I definitely encourage you to think about open licensing, and would be happy to chat about that even if you have no interest in Connexions itself.

Permanent links on wikis that run MediaWiki

[tepples]

references on Wikipedia are not static and therefore are unverifiable

Did you try following the "Permanent link" at the side of a page? The only way that a permanent link can disappear is if an article is deleted (or possibly moved; I'm not sure).

What questions do you have?

[rcragun]

I'm the primary author of this wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology (Introduction to Sociology). I wrote the initial version as a graduate student when: (1) I felt really guilty about making non-Sociology majors buy $100 textbooks that I was pretty sure they would never use again and sell back to the bookstore for about $10. (2) I came across Wikibooks and realized they had all the tools I needed to create a good textbook, plus, you can copy content from Wikipedia to get yourself started. (3) I had not experienced the textbook publisher's most effective tool for keeping professors assigning expensive books - complimentary copies for professors. I now receive dozens of "free" books every year from publishers. They, of course, give them to us for free so we don't know how much they will cost our students. (4) I was also really annoyed by the new-edition-every-other-year approach of the big publishers, which is just a ploy to make them more money!! Less than 5% of the content changes in textbooks that are published every other year. It's not about "the latest research"; it's about money for the publishers. I wrote up my initial experience with my textbook and published it here: http://www.sociology.org/content/2007/_cragun_futureoftextbooks.pdf If you have specific questions about this process, I'll happily answer them. As for your general questions about the experience... Well, you've already written a textbook, so you know it can be very time consuming. That's the first issue. The second issue is one that other people have mentioned - free, electronic books aren't always considered "legitimate" by academics. Why $$$=quality in the minds of professors, I don't know, but it seems to. As a result, people aren't always keen to adopt your book. Plus, and this isn't really an issue for you as you aren't in an academic position, despite the fact that my book is being used at 10-15 universities and has even been translated into a couple of different languages, it doesn't count as a publication. I'm not sure why. Once I get tenure, I will lobby for ebooks to count as publications for junior colleagues. Another major issue - if you do go the collaborative route (e.g., wikibooks), don't expect tons of collaboration. I don't know why more people haven't contributed to the text, but if you check the edit history of my wikibook, almost all of the editing has been done by yours truly. I even know a couple of the people who have adopted my text and they have said they will contribute, but they haven't done much (there are some exceptions, of course). So, I wouldn't expect a lot of collaboration unless you arrange it ahead of time. I'm still hoping that it will happen one day. Any other questions?

I hate to be 'that guy'

[RobDude]

But I don't think it will work....

People don't buy 'Textbooks' outside of Academia. They might buy a book that covers technical or educational topics - but it won't be a textbook.

I think the concept of an Open Source Textbook is nice, but again, the only textbooks that are read are the ones assigned to the students by their teachers and professors. And, rarely, does the actual teacher or professor have any choice in the book.

College Algebra hasn't changed since my Dad went to college - but every year or two the University I attended required a new edition of some $100 dollar book. Rendering the old book 'worthless' and forcing thousands of students to purchase a new book.

It's not because they need that new book. It's not because the fundamentals of algebra have changed....it's about money. If your opensource book is available for free, it might be a great book, but it will never be a good textbook. It's all politics and money.

Re:I hate to be 'that guy'

[jemmons]

I'll grant you that K-12 teachers don't always have much, if any, influence over the books that they buy, but college professors? In my experience they have COMPLETE control over what they teach, particularly senior faculty, as they can pretty much tell the bookstore to stock whatever they want. What they lack is a set of visible, viable alternatives to what they and their colleagues have been using, which is what these initiatives are trying to accomplish.

Your example of college algebra is precisely the reason that this sort of thing WILL work - not overnight, but eventually. At some point, professors are going to realize that that, collectively, they have more knowledge than what's available from a single textbook, and all it takes is an agreement to share that information freely in order to have something bigger and better than what we have now. We don't need to continue to rent an inferior product at an insulting price when we already own that knowledge.

The Lulu web site is VERY confusing.

[Futurepower(R)]

You are showing how confusing is the Lulu web site. Three people have tried, and three people have gotten different prices from the site.

I got the $72 from a calculation on a Lulu web page.

press with open access policy

[wanchai]

go for a real press with open access, say http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/publish/ . the advantage is that library over the world probably wants to buy a hard copy from a real press, and you can let those online user to use the book online, plus a channel to sell hard copies.

Collaborative Statistics - An open textbook model

[Jane Park]

I would definitely check out the different open textbook platforms out there, some of which were mentioned above, such as the CK-12 Foundation. One model you might look at is the open textbook "Collaborative Statistics" that is published on the Connexions website (http://cnx.org). I interviewed Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky last year, and they talk about what they went through in terms of publishing logistics and also the professional and academic results of publishing openly. See ccLearn's Inside OER interview: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11112. Hope this helps!

my experience

[jayhawk]

i started writing an open source textbook on my sabbatical last year. i have 6 chapters of what will be 10. i flirted with the idea of putting it on Wikibooks as some folks suggested above, but i found that a cohesive textbook is not something that can be community written easily, if at all. it's far easier for me to create the whole framework and then fill in the details and make the end product something i can put on Wikibooks for the masses to tweak. that way, i can keep my final copy . . . i use Drupal's Book module. i can always tweak and revise my copy based on what happens on the Wikibook version (although, i am also flirting with a wiki version that i host and then i can approve potential authors before they contribute. having a wiki version on the side allows edits to be made all year and then some time in early August the edits can be moved over to the more permanent copy (in my case, Drupal Book version) and remain intact during the school year for students and instructors. i also explore lulu.com as a way for students to have a printed copy. unfortunately, a printed copy isn't going to be idea in my case because i am adding multimedia elements to better illustrate some points and enhance the content. but i also wrote a textbook previously that was published by a big publishing firm. i ended up making a few thousand dollars, which meant that i probably made about 20 cents for each hour i worked on the textbook. and the publisher and bookstore took a HUGE chunk of my work (far more than i made). that's what caused me to consider what i am now doing. i'll be using my 6 chapters this semester so i am looking forward to it. good luck in your efforts.

Re:my experience

[Teancum]

In regards to Wikibooks, you will find that for all but the most "popular" books on the site are pretty much a one-man band in terms of a really motivated individual who knows the topic in depth and has taken the time and effort to put the content onto the site. Some of these mostly single-author books have achieved some fairly good polish too, although I'll admit that most of them are half completed projects in need of somebody else to finish the project.

The Wikibooks community, at least the "regulars" who provide the infrastructure and try to battle vandalism and massive abuse, is a relatively small community where nearly everybody knows something about everybody else. There are some sub-communities that have formed, usually around specific book projects, but on the whole it isn't too hard to get connected and familiar or even introduced to everybody else. Perhaps you don't have the time to get involved to that level, but you will find a generally receptive community there.

At the very least, consider Wikibooks as a public archive. For as long as the Wikimedia Founation continues to receive donations, content put onto Wikibooks (particularly extensive contributions such as a whole textbook) is going to be kept and preserved. There have been several other similar books which have been donated to Wikibooks in the past, most notably a series of books that came from the United Nations and are being preserved on Wikibooks to get wider dissemination.

There have also been several "class projects" where assignments were given for students to write a chapter in Wikibooks and try to tie the whole thing together in a coherent book. Most of these have been graduate-level courses, but some have involved undergraduates as well with success. Indeed, I would think that getting a group of graduate level students together to write an undergraduate textbook in their discipline could prove to be useful in a whole bunch of ways, even if it never actually gets used by anybody else when they are finished.

As far as physically printing out a book, there are dozens of printers that you can work with besides Lulu, and there may even be a couple of printers in the town where you are living that would do a pretty good job. At the very least, consider sending students off to Kinko's or some other photocopy place, where such textbooks and supplemental materials used to be purchased and could be again in large numbers... if open sourced textbooks were available for places like that to print up.

Not Wikipedia. Wikibooks!

[RobBebop]

Wikibooks is the best source of open source educational books.

The folks at CK12.org also probably know a thing or two, since they get most of their content from Wikipedia and were recently distinguished by the governor of the state of California for producing three books which meets the state requirements for an elementary school text book.

amazon and createspace

[wdj]

lulu has been mentioned but if you want to send your book to a "vanity press", amazon only accepts http://www.createspace.com/ books. You might also want to look into asking your old publisher if they would allow you to post the pdf of your new book on a website such as http://www.opentextbook.org/ with an appropriate Creative Common license, allowing them to publish the hard copy. (I did, and they were okay with a pdf but not okay with the LaTeX source - so good luck!) I've used createspace.com myself several times. It is, I understand, slightly more complicated than lulu, but they seem to do a good job. For example, you have to provide a non-standard sized 8''x10'' formatted pdf. (This is fairly easy if your text is in LaTeX). The only option I have used is their free option (you can pay to get an upgraded account with certain benefits ...). The only thing you need to pay for is the proof copy, whcih you must order and approve before publication. Then it is goes on sale on createspace.com and amazon.com.

Possible Open Source Solution: Page2Pub

[mattBernius]

Hi, I'm with the Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology. One of the things we specialize in is developing open source applications and support content for people interested in self publishing, One of our projects, Page2Pub (http://opl.rit.edu/project/page2pub), can be used in conjunction with a wiki platform, to enable some interesting publishing solutions. Page2Pub is a pair of open source applications that gather content from the web and assemble it into an epub document. The second application can then reformat that epub doc for publication in other media. The current version of the platform is optimized for gathering content from wikis and using it to generate a print ready PDF book that can then be sent to any print on demand service. This fall we are hoping to run a test of the platform with a professor at RIT who has developed a wiki based coursebook. Each quarter, the prof and his class, use and expand upon the previous classes work. He's planning to use Page2Pub to develop short primer books/pamphlets from that course material (and content on other sites like the Wikipedia). If you have questions about Page2Pub or self publishing in general, feel free to drop me a line, - Matt (Open Publishing Lab at RIT, http://opl.rit.edu/ e. mbernius@mail.rit.edu)

How to find open textbooks

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find ways to locate open textbooks at http://oerconsortium.org/resources/
To find open content via Google, see instructions posted at http://oerconsortium.org/announcements/
A list of open textbooks organized by subject matter is posted at http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi

The particular topic you want to publish for is of interest to me.
Would you be looking for a person to bounce ideas around with ??

I also like the Wolfram product ALPHA which helps people find the topic or sub-topic

Once you have a text-book in electronic form google searching is possible and so is ALPHA.

I was able to get an author to write an answers book once - LINUX kernel related. I understood
that it was very useful later on.

If your text-book requires any formula layout stuff or something that looks like a plottted graphic
then maybe you could look at Web-Mathematica (much better at publishing graphics and formats
for the most part). Web-Mathematica has hooks into Mathematica so that a web-Mathematica
site can display results of complex calculations.

My interest in Medical stuff stems from a recent stay in hospital - heart attack.
I would like to contribute something back into that area.
One area I might be able to help with is Speech-to-Text for controlling medical equipment.
I saw first-hand how the nurses flounder with buttons and controls when they should
be concentrating on the patients.

cjt@aussec.com

contribute to FLOSS Manuals

[eset]

hi, you could consider starting a free manual or text book in FLOSS Manuals. It was mentioned before above, however there was no detail given on the process. Essentially you can use FM to author by yourself or in collaboration, a text licensed under a free license. We have a very good tool set for authoring online and we can output material to print ready pdf for resale on lulu.com or anyother print on demand or online resale outlet (if you wish you can take your content through the amazon sales chain as well). There is a manual on FLOSS Mnaulas if you want to know more : http://www.flossmanuals.net/flossmanuals... adam (founder of FM)