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

"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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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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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.

free textbooks useless without problem sets

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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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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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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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

Multiple editions suppress secondhand market

...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!

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.

Here are my suggestions

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.

Re:Here are my suggestions

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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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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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

Prices in the 60's

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.

Slightly overlooked here....

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.

Do Students Actually Buy books anymore?

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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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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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

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.

maketextbooksaffordable.org

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

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.

Engineering and CS texts should be (f)ree

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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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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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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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.