Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks

Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."

Comments

It would be nice, admittedly

[elrous0]

Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education.

I love that vision, but I don't think Houghton Mifflin and all those universities that make money off their bookstores are going down without a fight.

BTW, on a related note, has anyone else noticed that a lot of universities now are requiring students to not only buy books, but also access codes to course websites? My niece is taking undergrad classes and had to spend about $200 extra on these course codes during her first semester to access MANDATORY class websites (one of them was "MyMathPlus," I remember). Seems like a pretty sleazy way to make even more money for someone.

Re:It would be nice, admittedly

[avandesande]

Time for someone to start an open source college/university

Re:It would be nice, admittedly

[donaggie03]

We require MML for our algebra classes. The upside is that the textbook is recommended, so the student is free to choose their own algebra text, new or used, current edition or old, etc). So the total cost to the student is less than $50 for the code, plus however much they want to spend at half price books or online for any decent algebra textbook (international editions are godawful cheap). That's usually far cheaper than the cost of a new textbook, even without the access code.

I agree though; forcing the student to pay for the access code AND a new textbook is just being greedy/lazy.

Prizes Instead of Pay

[ohnocitizen]

Look this is an admirable goal, an effort to bring down the cost of undergraduate education (and make materials more readily available to the public). But this trend of offering small prizes in exchange for creative/academic work is a race to the bottom. How long until the private sector tries this with more and more jobs? Its taking the 99designs approach to academia.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[Samantha Wright]

It's interesting how you're saying this is not good at a large-sum, high-scale level, but in general Slashdotters think that doing it on a smaller scale, with donations to musicians, is a good one. As an IP discussion: when does the 'non-guaranteed pay' model work and when is it toxic?

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[Endo13]

I think it has a lot more to do with what people need (but don't really like) and what they want (and really like).

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[semi-extrinsic]

The race to the bottom is complete, in the sense that these books were being given away free of charge long before any reward was offered. This is also the case with many more text books, and not only in undergraduate education. See e.g. Mark Srednicki's Quantum Field Theory book: http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/qft.html

Sure, it's a preprint version with a few minor errors, but it was immensely useful when I took QFT 1. (Tony Zee's QFT in a Nutshell was the approved course book, and that is a good book as well, but completely opposite of Srednicki in terms of how detailed calculations they do, etc., so it was useful to have both.)

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[BasilBrush]

As an IP discussion: when does the 'non-guaranteed pay' model work and when is it toxic?

Which ever way means that the Slashdotter gets free stuff.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[shaitand]

Why is it good for a corporation to charge as much as the market will bear for a book but not good for the market to pay as little as possible for one?

$20k is also actually not a low fee for a book. You need to sell a good 100k copies to see in that ballpark with a traditional publisher.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[chichilalescu]

For now I'm a postdoc, but I plan to teach someday. When I do that, I think it would be common sense to have a set of lecture notes, and I think it would be quite natural to turn these lecture notes into a book. It is my understanding that people usually do this when they teach a course on the problems they're researching. Thus I am already getting payed for writing the book (because I get payed as a teacher), and the book should be distributed freely once it's written.

The prize should not be an incentive to generate the book...

Free?

[Jawnn]

Free textbooks?! This is madness; pure socialist madness. What's next? Free college tuition?

Re:Free?

[vlm]

Free textbooks?! This is madness; pure socialist madness. What's next? Free college tuition?

Maybe we should steal the model of tuition funding and research funding, for textbook funding. If everyone in our culture benefits from freely available textbooks, either directly or indirectly, have the govt underwrite them and release them under a completely open license. You wanna sell paper textbooks? Fine, but you better sell them cheaper than a laserprinter cost per page. Don't like the govt issue? Fine, its CC license, so replace the sections you don't like with your own.

One killer problem is $20K is way too little to develop a completely new 400 page textbook. Its gonna take at least 1, maybe 2 years of fairly concentrated effort. And $20K/yr is probably way too much to keep it up to date. The solution is not to award money for new books but to award money to pull a currently project gutenberg free public domain book up to current standards.

Re:Free?

[BasilBrush]

I'm all for text-books being free. So long as the academic that wrote it was somehow paid at a suitable rate for the time he spent creating it.

A competition tends to mean X people create a work, and X-1 people don't get paid anything for that work. Its a morally vacuous way of getting work done on the cheap, whilst wasting most peoples time. It's neither socialist nor capitalist, but more closely fits slavery.

Long-term sustainability of this model?

[MikeTheGreat]

On the one hand I really like the idea of keeping incidental costs of education down by doing things like making textbooks available for free. On the other hand I'm mature enough to realize that nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free*.

So my concern for the long-term sustainability of this model is this:
1) One-time grant money is made available to create a free textbook
2) The free textbook reduces the profitability of the proprietary books, which then leave the market
3) Since the money in step #1 is one-time, and since grantors looooooooooove to fund New Awesome Advances but hate to fund Ongoing Operating Expenses, Maintenance and Upkeep the free textbook languishes
3.1) Making non-trivial changes to the textbook is a huge undertaking, so the already-overworked teachers using the book won't be making wholesale revisions to it regularly
3.1.1) Maybe I"m wrong on 3.1, and I've love to see links to projects that contradict 3.1

4) The textbook market is now gone but the free textbooks aren't being maintained either.

I'd love to hear discussion on this, but I'd particularly like to see established, free textbooks that are genuinely self-supporting.

* Yes, yes please do feel free to reply to this post with whatever online, free books you know about. I look forwards to seeing your list

Re:Long-term sustainability of this model?

[gslj]

"nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free."

http://www.lightandmatter.com/books.html
http://lightandmatter.com/french/
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/ (an extended, on-line version of the University of Toronto's long-time textbook "Representative Poetry")

Keep in mind that many of the textbooks assigned for English classes are classic books, now public domain.

Look at it this way: a professor is going to put together the equivalent of a textbook in handouts and lecture notes anyway, over the years. They don't necessarily think it will make them money in a crowded market. Many, in those circumstances, wouldn't mind sharing, and would keep it up to date for their own use. If they bring in a few like-minded souls, they could keep it up to date just like an open-source programming project.

Then have the prize go to...

[gwolf]

Somebody in a third-world country.
Seriously. I am an academician in UNAM (Mexico; largest Spanish-speaking university in the world). A beginning academician as myself earns about US$1500 a month, and the best payed academicians in UNAM will get... Up to 10 times as much. I published a book this year (granted, a book of research results on Free Software and similar communities, not a textbook), and it took me approx. ¼ of my time for 18 months. The university does not pay me royalties on sold copies (and that's part of the reason I negotiated for it to be a free CC-BY-SA book).
If the prize is not too distant from a year worth of qualified job income... Hell, it's a very interesting job to take!

Re:First Round of "winners" arranged?

[Brad Lucier]

The book wasn't distributed under the CC BY 3.0 license until the Saylor Foundation awarded the prizes. The copyright notice was changed after the prizes were announced. The texts were freed.