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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.