Competition In the Free Textbook Market

bcrowell writes "The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs. They plan to make their profits from add-ons like podcast study guides and mobile phone flashcards. Books will be licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Other companies trying to find a workable business model for free textbooks include Ink Textbooks (revenue from online homework) and Freeload Press (revenue from ads inside the books). So far, none of these companies seems to have succeeded in building up much of a catalog of books; it seems more common for authors of free textbooks to take a DIY approach, putting PDFs on their own web pages, and sometimes arranging on-demand printing with vanity-press publishers like lulu.com. Lots and lots of web sites exist to help people find free textbooks, and CalPIRG has an active campaign pushing for affordable textbooks."

Paying for textbooks

[CRCulver (715279)]

"The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs.

One of the nicest things I find about studying in Finland is that the university provides enough textbooks in the library for students to use. It's nice to escape the cycle of buying textbooks and then having to sell them four months down the road.

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[dgerman (78602)]

I once put a copy of the textbook for my course in our library (on reserve). The book got stolen.
Few weeks later the univ police busted a "textbook thieves" ring that was reselling them to the
university library (yes, this at the level of a Darwin Award :)

This tells you how valuable/expensive textbooks are to some students.

--dmg

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[bhima (46039)]

The first time through that comment I read it as "One of the nicest things I find about studying in Flatland".

Which made wonder what their physics lectures were like.

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[hedwards (940851)]

Don't mock that, as we speak there are thousands of physics students that would love to only have to deal with 2d motion.

free textbooks useless without problem sets

[Aeron65432 (805385)]

Free textbooks are great and all if you want to learn the subject, like Yale/Harvard's free classroom recordings. But if you're taking a class at a university, most of the time these aren't going to be useful. Economics, engineering, calculus, all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book. I bought one edition earlier than the one recommended for my economics class and I've had to borrow my friends text to do all the work. Great idea, but I don't see it being useful unless you can somehow get all the college professors to start adopting them/copy the homework separately. (Given that a lot of books are written by the professors themselves, they are unlikely to drop a major revenue stream)

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[Enderandrew (866215)]

I think the idea is to try and have colleges adopt them. Using a non-standard book for a class isn't very helpful, as you pointed out.

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[jambarama (784670)]

Only useless if you're using one of these to avoid paying for your required text. If this is your required text, no homework problems. As a side note, what are you going to college for anyway, to learn or to do homework? And the two need not be mutually exclusive, these books (if well written) and the recordings you suggest could be fine supplements to your existing set of materials.

I think there is an even bigger need for these type of books in elementary and secondary schools. These books are no ch

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[jambarama (784670)]

err... "these books" (beginning the second sentence of the second paragraph) is supposed to reference elementary/secondary textbooks, not the ones from TFA. Sorry for any confusion.

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[cbart387 (1192883)]

Only useless if you're using one of these to avoid paying for your required text.

It really depends on the prof. I have had profs who will put a book as required even though it's only for a reference manual. In that case, I use my judgement if I'd want to use that book as a reference manual or not. Sorry Mr. Gittleman, you won't get any more money from this student.

That was just a caveat, I do however agree with your point. I would always buy the Math books, international edition :), because you know that there will be problems for homework. Also, the math books usually give you

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[Adambomb (118938)]

I can't think of a single course i took where the vetted textbook isn't available for student-use photocopies in the library. I would have LOVED something like this to be able to have all the hardcopy data and simply photocopy the problem sets (and possibly the corresponding back of the book).

Is this something thats specific only outside the US? Do american universities not do this as well?

And dont give me the "but it's never in long enough" cop-out if they do =). You can photocopy a whole semesters worth o

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[archshade (1276436)]

I'm finishing my first year of uni in a couple of weeks and I'm really happy that my lecturers have gone to the trouble of producing "tutorial books" which are just questions for each of my modules and short answers in the back.

We do have 2 required books that we were told to buy but I managed to get though the first term without them and one book I haven't used at all. The other one I have. Its a good electronics textbook clear and a decent level of detail. I don't think theres any reason why any of the

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[IKILLEDTROTSKY (1197753)]

You know, I think you hit it on the head with the revenue stream quote. I don't know how many times I've sat in class and thought about how I could be watching a video of the prof. and reading a standardized text book and not paying 2 grand a semester. In fact, I have had quite a few audio books on a subject that were better than the professor for about 600 dollars lees. Free-market is a joke in the U.S.

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[IKILLEDTROTSKY (1197753)]

exactly, and most state colleges don't give any thing but text book knowledge like you say, but to get the job you need the piece of paper. I'm sure I could pay a professional from my field 15k to make me his assistant and teach me all he knows for a year and I'd know more and save money then when I'm done w/ school, but I'd never get hired since I don't have a degree.

Multiple editions suppress secondhand market

[Roger W Moore (538166)]

...all classes I've taken in these various subjects have had all the homework directly from the problem sets in the book.

The problem of multiple book editions is one reason why I now always try to make up my own questions for assignments. That plus my students get used to the type of questions I ask so the exam is not very different to what they are used to.

In fact I am convinced that the only reason the books for large 1st year courses have new editions so frequently is to change the question numbers to suppress the second hand market. In one extreme case I'd pointed out several errors in a text to the publisher and they published a new version without any of the errors fixed but the questions numbers all changed (but with the vast majority of the questions exactly the same!). Unfortunately it backfired because I was the course convener that year and we changed to a book from a different publisher...which then prompted the original book's author to contact me through the editors to fix the errors! Needles to say this interest in profit over accuracy did not leave me with a good impression!

Thank F'n God! It's about time!

[iamsamed (1276082)]

What irritated me most in College and especially 'B' school was that these textbooks would run for $80-$130 a piece (and many were soft cover!) and the exact same material was available in some layman's book for under $50. AND, the next Semester rolls around and guess what? Yep, the instructor is using the "new" edition and you have to buy the "new" edition. It was usually a new cover and higher price...that's about it.

Now, someone once argued with me that information changes and you need to have the latest info. Well, I replied, there's several years lead time from writing to publishing a text and therefore, it's out of date before it's published. And besides, tell me what advances in business that are occurring that requires those in B-school to have the "latest" info? Hmmm? (Even in the group psychology class where you'd think with the social sciences improving there'd would be a need for up to date info. Nope. I had to buy a $120 paperback that told us about Myers-Briggs and when you had a problem with an employee, the correct answer for everything was send him to "sensitivity training". I'm not fucking kidding.) If you have to teach the latest info, then you shouldn't use textbooks.

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[AHumbleOpinion (546848)]

And besides, tell me what advances in business that are occurring that requires those in B-school to have the "latest" info? Hmmm?

About half of my b-school classes have two books. One a typical textbook and the other a publish on demand soft cover book that is a compilation of academic papers or important articles from the business press. Some of these papers/articles are classics, some are quite recent. Such compilations do need to change each year. The remaining half of my classes have one book, a com

Open Courseware

[Enderandrew (866215)]

Adoption by opencourseware would no doubt improve visiblity of these projects. I also wonder if content taken from opencourseware could be put into these books.

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[guacamole (24270)]

Where do you get the idea that opencourseware constitutes complete course material? Opencourseware is simply a central web site for individual class web pages. Professors at any university, not just MIT, often setup web sites for their courses. On such web sites, you can usually find the course syllabus, list of homeworks, and sometimes homework solutions and occasionally lecture notes of variable quality. Does that constitute everything you need to learn the subject? Most of the time no way. I have been lo

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[Enderandrew (866215)]

opencourseware utilizes textbooks, which is why I suggested they might be able to adopt some of these "free" textbooks, allowing for a truly free class. MIT said one of their goals was allowing people in developing nations to get their education without actually attending MIT. Because of the textbooks, that isn't feasible unless people in developing nations have access to those books.

As for content from opencouseware going into books, opencourseware does provide lectures. Where do you think textbooks get

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[guacamole (24270)]

It really depends on the subject and professor, but at least at undergraduate level, lectures or lecture notes alone rarely substitute a good text when one is available.

I am not really sure what you mean by "opencourseware does provide lectures". Most opencourseware class web sites provide neither lecture notes nor recorded lectures.

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[Enderandrew (866215)]

There are several schools and sites that contribute to opencourseware, but last time I checked, most MIT classes specifically provided recorded lectures and lecture notes.

Here are my suggestions

[line-bundle (235965)]

One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.

Also I am not too keen on the lower cost electronic versions of the books unless the publishers are monitored carefully. The electronic editions I have seen cost slightly less than the paper edition, and expire after 6 months. Students then are poorer as a result.

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[dgerman (78602)]

You are assuming the prof who _asks_ you to buy the book for his/her course makes money from that. That is not true unless he/she authored it too.

The prof gets perks (free copies of books) though.

--dmg

Re:Here are my suggestions

[bcrowell (177657)]

One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.
Speaking as a college professor, I think you're wrong on both points. Professors' salaries are actually very reasonable these days. Also, very little of the retail price of a $130 goes in the professor's pocket. Most textbooks do not make any significant amount of money for their authors -- the exceptions are home-run books aimed at the most popular freshman courses, and there just aren't that many of those. The typical motivation for a professor to write a textbook is that he doesn't like the choices that are already available.

The reason for high textbook prices is profit-taking by publishers. In the last 25 years, textbook prices have risen much, much faster than can be explained by inflation.

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[cvd6262 (180823)]

As a professor, I second both your points.

I will also add that many professors would love to contribute to open materials, but cannot because posting something to their website doesn't count in one's tenure dossier. If a company like FlatWorld Knowledge can underwrite the textbook (even with just the promise to make it available, no upfront cost) it will encourage the production of open educational material.

However, I contacted FWK and found that they're only focusing on business and economics texts for the

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[guacamole (24270)]

That's not the reason. The median salary of a professor at a UC campus is about $130.000. How much more should they get paid? The biggest problem is that the established text book authors and publishers have too much market power. For many subjects there are really just one or two really good books. In other cases, professors are just lazy and want to teach the course using the same text they had been using for the past 20 years, and for more part they don't care whether the book costs $50 or $150.

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[Unfocused (723787)]

I had a prof a few years ago who asked to see all students who had bought his $60 textbook. He had a jar of $2 coins on his desk, and when one of those students went to see him, he would give that student one of the $2 coins. That $2 coin represented his cut of the sale. He refused to take royalties from students, as he had wrote the textbook specifically for students, not to make money. The publishing company set the price of the textbook, and it seemed the publishing company got most of the profit from i

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[The -e**(i*pi) (1150927)]

most professors make between $80k and $130k per year at my university.
Associate professors make a little less with most between $50k and 90k per year.

and I can prove it if you ask.

now why do you think that $100k is a bad salary?

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[The -e**(i*pi) (1150927)]

There are 3 professors I know of who wrote their own book (well one is technically just notes and questions but it is as good as a book)

one has it free for students in his class on his website

one has it free for students in his class on his website and has an arrangement for really cheap printing if you want.

one sells it in the bookstore for a lot of money and the other professor who teaches the course switched to a free book halfway through.

Prices in the 60's

[Jeff1946 (944062)]

My second semester freshman physics text (Sears and Zemansky, the standard of its day (1965)) has the price of $7.50 stamped in it. This was about 4x the miniumum wage. It has ~500 pages, weighs 2.2 lbs (1 kg), and no color.

No reason why this book could not be used today, except a conspiracy by publishers to raise profits by adding lots of extra material, color photos etc, frequently changing editions to devalue used copies.

Life was good then, the was no tuition at the University of California where I attended and gas was $0.29 a gallon (6 gal = 1 hr minimum wage). The biggest downside was no word processors.

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[dieman (4814)]

I know a few of the colleges at the University of Minnesota have reverted to developing their own course packets instead of using books. Its obscene when the cost of a math book is $130+. I think my course packet cost was somewhere less than $45 for the same class, well over half off. This project has the upside that schools can collaborate on these 'course packets'.

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[Hadlock (143607)]

the was no tuition at the University of California where I attended
 
I always wondered how my dad, a son of a carpenter, managed to afford to attend Berkley.

Slightly overlooked here....

[zappepcs (820751)]

Slightly overlooked here is the fact that the Internet has commoditized information. That is to say, it has done to book sellers what it has done to the **AA.

While it is not in the public eye as much, several here have pointed out the huge monetary waste in buying/selling text books, and the book sellers/education system keep updating so that users are caught in a continual upgrade cycle. When there is a method of cheap updates the continued use of repetitive upgrade cycles in paper issued texts is nothing short of usury.

Any educational institution that wants to be a valued place to attend should be flowing with the times and 'getting it' now, not 4 years from now, or not when the board members want to think about it. This technology is here NOW, and it's yesterday's news, not some high tech promise for the future.

Yes, it only takes one meeting to start the ball rolling to ensure that the electronic texts match what classes and professors teach, and that the paper and electronic forms are identical in content. The fact that they are not yet is nothing less than gouging.

Yes, damn it, it is THAT simple. We will NOT buy your text books UNLESS you provide electronic access to the same identical texts. That is ALL it takes. Publishers will jump to get the business.

Look, if I can buy the book for $90 or get access to it from a school server in electronic form for $25, I'll probably go for the electronic. The costs of books is about 30% printing/distribution. The rest has to be done for both formats.

I stopped buying programming books some time ago because all I need is behind that Google screen. Even very high quality PhD materials are available on the Internet.

While people are worried how they will make money they have missed out on the fact that information itself has now become a commodity. Time for change, here and now, not next year. The **AA is having to deal with it and their example of doing so is not one that publishers really want to go with. They need to look at social websites and other popular websites to ensure that their chosen method of 'upgrade' is going to work.

My suggestions?
Offer electronic texts, sell paper based Q/A sections. DRM won't work, so there will be copying, can't get around that. The photocopier put paid to any such scheme long ago. Now it's just easier. Make it easily available. Make it fun. If an account based system is used, make it more useful than just retrieving texts. Add value to the account. Charge for the account through the school system so that students have an EASY way to pay if they wish. When you have done it right students will be making your website their homepage, if you're looking for milestones in your effort.

As far as information goes, give people readers for your content for free, and make them work on ANYTHING. Charge a service fee for the account, and only charge for premium content beyond that. Yes, there will be copying, but then people borrowed books all the time before this anyway. Quit fretting and suing, just make your content the best available and work out how to survive on lower margins in a commoditized market.

Economic forces

[dgerman (78602)]

One of the main problems of the textbook market is that the buyer has usually no choice but to buy the book.

The real choice is made by the instructor, who has NO incentive to choose a cheaper textbook. Intructors (I am one of them) are heavily sought by the publishing houses (in my experience once exception is O'Reilly, the worse Pearson Education).

The second hand market is one of the few attempts to lower prices. Publishes counter-act it by dropping frequent updates (usually needless).

The only way to count

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[c618656fa053510d1984 (1206672)]

Why? I don't understand this. Does it matter from which book you learn a subject? I'm studying CS in Germany, and while I have bought some textbooks, I never *needed* to. You can get by with the library, the lecture slides, your own notes, and looking stuff up on the internet. The professors tend to hand out exercise sheets or put them on their website, so you don't depend on textbooks for that either. What makes the situation in the US so different?

Do Students Actually Buy books anymore?

[MrSteveSD (801820)]

Back in the mid 90s when I was at Uni, there was a lot of complaining over the price of books, e.g. £25 for each volume of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There was also a lot of anger towards copyrights. I remember a sign in the college Library with a cartoon cat warning students not to photocopy sheet music, and people had written underneath "Music is not just for fat cats to make a profit".

If we could have magically just duplicated our books, we would have been handing them around to everyone and spending the money on beer instead. I'm not saying it's right, but we definitely would have done it. Today that "Magic Duplication" is very easy to do since I'm sure most books have been scanned in by somebody. I can imagine DVD's with thousands of books on them being passed around colleges all over the world.

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[MBC1977 (978793)]

I do (even though I get them for free through my university) because I believe that information is a chargeable asset and not a commodity. One of things that frustrates me is the fact that people believe that if someone invests the time and energy to create / compile / design / or market, that it should be sold for next to nothing. I'm sorry but I don't have an altristic view of society. Time is money. If I'm not making money than its not worth my time. If you like giving away your work, then great. I

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[MrSteveSD (801820)]

I do (even though I get them for free through my university) because I believe that information is a chargeable asset and not a commodity.

Not all information should be chargeable. Should you really have to pay £25 ($50) for each volume of the Feynman Lectures? He's been dead since 1988 so getting paid is not going to be an incentive for him to write any more books. A lot of the books you need for courses tend to be classics and their authors are often dead. Publishing houses make a mint out of these classic books, especially when they are only available in hardback (the cardboard must be made from very rare trees or something).

Fo

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[MBC1977 (978793)]

When you look at all of the costs in the supply chain, textbooks updates (new proofs, spelling, questions, pictures, etc.) orders received, manufacturing and distribution costs, merchandising, etc. And while not all aspects of that example may apply; I believe yes, there is some justification for the price.

"For more current books, perhaps lecturers should just make their books available electronically and bypass the publishing houses completely. They'd probably make more money by having a "donate" butto

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[MrSteveSD (801820)]

When you look at all of the costs in the supply chain, textbooks updates (new proofs, spelling, questions, pictures, etc.) orders received, manufacturing and distribution costs, merchandising, etc. And while not all aspects of that example may apply; I believe yes, there is some justification for the price.

Surely the marked increase in the price of hardback books vs paperbacks gives you some clue that the pricing is a tad arbitrary. It goes above and beyond any increase in costs. It's worth looking at Rip-off 101 [maketextbo...rdable.org], which was a recent study about practices in the publishing industry.

If your a professor, you have no guarantee that all of students in the course will purchase the book

What does that have to do with a book being made available electronically? If the books are physical there is no guarantee everyone will have a copy either. In fact if a book was available electronically, it's more likel

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[quanticle (843097)]

I do (even though I get them for free through my university) because I believe that information is a chargeable asset and not a commodity. One of things that frustrates me is the fact that people believe that if someone invests the time and energy to create / compile / design / or market, that it should be sold for next to nothing.

Your point would be valid if people actually spent time actually redesigning the books. To illustrate my point, let me point you to Discrete Mathematics and its Applications. Knowing that I'd have to take a discrete mathematics course in the upcoming semester, I went ahead and purchased a used copy of the fifth edition (the latest edition at the time) from a friend who had already taken the course. However, when the new semester rolled around, I found that the professor was using the newly released six

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[ThinkingInBinary (899485)]

I've thought about not buying the books myself, but often it's a matter of convenience. For example, I'm in Matter and Interactions (an "honors" intro physics course) and we've had to buy, each semester, a $120-ish, paperback textbook. It's a decent textbook, sure, but horribly overpriced. But having to chase down a copy from the library or a friend whenever I want to do the homework (which can be at strange times) or when I (and consequently my friends) need to study for an exam is a big hassle.

Intelligent Books

[williamhb (758070)]

At Cambridge University, I've been developing a system called the Intelligent Book, that changes the idea of "an online textbook" into something that might genuinely be more useable and useful than a paper book, and much less cost/effort to write. (Though a paper book certainly can be printed from it.) This has some implications for the textbook market if it does take off, because online collaborative/interactive materials provided by a university tend to be free to students, and increasingly to the wider public.

The public demonstrator is not yet online, so this link just goes to parking, but if you want to revisit it later, it will be gradually going up at http://www.theintelligentbook.com/ [theintelligentbook.com].

It came out of my PhD, completed a year ago, which in turn was part of a joint project with MIT.

ridiculous prices.

[the brown guy (1235418)]

I spent over $500 on textbooks, and when I dropped my chemistry course (I'm in arts, but I wrongly decided to take chem), they said that I can't get a refund because I had had the books for over 2 weeks. It was 1 week into the semester, and I had bought the books 2 weeks before classes started. As a first year, I mistakenly assumed that if I had a textbook in sealed packing with a receipt, that they should return it. I now refuse to buy textbooks from my university bookstore (here at UBC), and instead look

maketextbooksaffordable.org

[bcrowell (177657)]

Nicole Allen, Textbooks Program Director at CalPIRG, wrote to say that a more relevant link than the CalPIRG link at the end of my slashdot summary would be maketextbooksaffordable.org [maketextbo...rdable.org]. That's where the information about CalPIRG's open textbooks campaign is.

Oxymoron

[stevejsmith (614145)]

Free market in education is an oxymoron. Through public universities, land grants, tax breaks, tuition breaks, and research funding, the various levels of US government have taken all the market out of education at every level. That's why most top-tier universities charge $1000/mo. for housing, even when you're sharing one room (not one apartment, but one room) without someone else. There is no market when it comes to education.

Many online resources exist in mathematics

[Brad Lucier (547713)]

There are, by now, many free online resources of good quality, especially in fields like mathematics.

For example, although Ben Crowell, the original poster, doesn't mention it, he himself founded The Assayer [theassayer.org], a site that lists free books, carries reader reviews, etc.

Since 2001, I've been publishing a number of original mathematics textbooks as ebooks at the Trillia Group [trillia.com], all of which are DRM-free and freely licensed for student's self study. I'd hoped to license the "bits", rather than use dead tree

Engineering and CS texts should be (f)ree

[xtal (49134)]

The basic knowledge in an undergraduate engineering program, and most CS programs, is at last 100 or more years old. The fundamentals, like calculus, are much older than that again. There is no reason other than greed there cannot be a base set of books that contain the fundamental principles.

The rest is up to the professor. I did not go to university to read books. I can, and do, read at home in my own time. I went to university to learn from my professor's experiences with the material. Professors with no depth of knowledge in the material should not be teaching or relying on books to do that job for them.

My $0.02.

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[fishthegeek (943099)]

I am a teacher. Those "impartial" textbooks you mention are a lot of things but impartial is not one of them. Pick up a given history book and you see an awful lot of bias and authors perspective. Pick up any physics book, biology and just about any other science book and you will find that the author has imbued it with their own special brand of scientific explanation or ideas.

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[guacamole (24270)]

Unfortunately, in case of most courses listed there, those are simply course web pages (just like at any other school, albeit MIT centralizes this). What you can usually find is course syllabi, homework assignments, and such. Less often you will find homework solutions or even complete lecture notes. It's nice to have access to it so you know what they're doing at MIT, but for most part its still far from offering complete course materials. I looked at the most courses I am interested in, and they still for