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

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."

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

[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"

open-licensed distribution

[drDugan]

LegalTorrents does hosting and distribution of open licensed content:

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

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: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.

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

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).