Open-Source College Textbooks Gaining Mindshare

bcrowell writes "The LA Times has a front-page article about how open-source college textbooks are starting to gain traction. One author says, 'I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200,' and describes attempts by commercial publishers to bribe faculty to use their books. The Cal State system has started a Digital Marketplace to help faculty find out about their options for free and non-free digital textbooks, and the student group PIRG has collected 1200 faculty signatures on a statement of support for open textbooks."

Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

...few have lived to tell the tale.

Seriously, though, you can expect a HUGE pushback on this from the publishing industry (college textbooks are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many textbooks are) and even from some professors (they write the books, after all).

And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source textbooks? Even though academics don't usually get paid particularly well for their writing, it's unlikely that many academics are going want to tackle something as big as a survey-level textbook for free (with the occasional exception like the professor in the article).

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

Also...can you imagine a world were college text books are clear and concise and stick to the topic at hand? You can't sell a 100 page book for $200, but if the subject can be accurately covered in 100 pages... I don't think I have taken a college course yet that has used more than maybe 1/2 of any given $100-200+ book that I had to purchase. If the professors aren't being paid by the page volume trying to sell megabooks then you could conceivably take a course that only includes the pages that you will need in the course. Modular text books so to speak. What a wonderful world that would be. Even if they get printed and you pay some amount, can you imagine a world where you don't have a back injury from carrying more than a few college books around?!

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

Incredibly few college textbooks are in libraries, the few that are are usually 5 or more years out of date.

Incredibly few subjects change enough in five years to render textbooks out of date.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

I greatly disagree with your conclusion that available education would "destroy the gap between the haves and have nots." There has never been a time like today when so much education is available for free. Not even close. Big city libraries are dwarfed by the amount of educating material that is available to someone sitting at a computer in Nowhere, Alaska. MIT and many other .edus have their syllabus (and sometimes full streaming video of each class!) online for free.

I could arguably give myself a master's level education in most fields without leaving home. But too bad it won't give me the connections and other leg-ups that attending a $50k/yr brick and mortar will. (Think an MBA candidate learns all that much at Harvard Business School?) And too bad a diploma means more to most companies than know-how.

Close the gap? Sorry, but each and every day, more and more wealth consolidates with the wealthiest. IMHO, it's a bug in our implementation of capitalism.

But back to the article - I'd love to see open source textbooks as I think they'd stand a greater chance of being lucid. I remember the garbage book by professor had us buy for assembly class. It was barely relevant to the course.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

The "5 or more years out of date" is the exact innane argument that allows text book companies to give everyone the shaft. At the Associates or Bachelors level how many subjects are really moving that fast? Physics has remained largely unchanged, chemistry, geology, astronomy, calculus, algebra, statistics, english, speach, history, foreign languages, etc. Hell the only thing that has seemed to change that much is biology and that is legislated changes to curriculum, not scientific. Almost every subject taught at that level is mostly very old information. You typically don't get into the fast moving subjects until a bit higher in your education, and by the time you reach that level of understanding you are probably better off at a bookstore/library anyways. At the higher level in those fast moving fields it is more about active participation in expieriments and paper writing and such rather than sitting and listening to lectures and reading textbooks.

Re:This is the pushback!

Seriously, though, you can expect a HUGE pushback on this from the publishing industry (college textbooks are a big moneymaker, especially considering how overpriced many textbooks are) and even from some professors (they write the books, after all).

This is the pushback against high monopoly pricing. They are starting to find the breaking point in an otherwise inflexible market (Ya gotta have that book).

As the alternatives start to errode the monopoly, the publishers will adjust to find the maximum profit point, but the policies that are put in place to curb runaway prices will remain for quite some time.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

Aside from the money, a writing or contributing to a published book is a good line item on their cv and counts towards tenure, peer recognition, professional requirements, etc. I can't find the quote right now, but Terence Parr (ANTLR parser generator, USF professor) stated that's one reason the ANTLR v3 documentation was published rather than put up for free on the website.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

well there is an extra wonderful thing about this.

why do we need 20 diffrent math books?

why not have one in which allthe prof's can contribute to? so what if that one book has a thousand chapters - it is digital.. you can easily add/ change/ remove content and link to other peices.

you don't need one or tow guys to write the whole thing.. they jsut need to write a section. and when it comes down to most math books for college the only change from one edition to the next is typo's - some times added exlinations - and changeing of the questions and work sets.

if you could provide a book that is live and being updated - then you could do the questions as a list and let the prof just selected a set of them to assign as home work, and if ones he wants arn't there.. he can jsut add them to the list and then use them in his set and someone else can use it later.

it really supprises me this hasn't been doen before - but i am damn sure it can be done and would be extreamly useful.. but i bet money is the reason why we don't see it happening..

after having to pay >300 for a book for a single class - which happened to be writen bythe prof.. yea he got a hell of a kick back.. cause i know they don't pay him enough.. (might that not be the root of the problem?)

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

why do we need 20 diffrent math books? why not have one in which allthe prof's can contribute to?

Not all variety in textbooks on the same subject is accounted for by differences in what material is left out; often authors disagree on how best to present the same core concepts. This variety is good: professors can find the best match to his or her course, and students/researchers can seek out books that resonate with their learning styles. One massive, exhaustive textbook would be a valuable resource for its completeness, but potentially a nightmare to learn from. The problem would only be exacerbated if the authors did not conform to a single standard for notation and terminology, which in itself is asking a lot.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

In europe some universities do without textbooks. The teacher teaches and guess what? The students have to write everything the teacher says.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

I'd really hate that, because I like to read the book myself, and I don't need somebody reading it to me. Having to write everything down distracts from trying to understand what he is saying. If you go home with a bunch of notes that you don't understand, what good is that?

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

Nice analogy, but now the whole discussion will be talking about Linux instead of open source textbooks.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

Okay, I'll grant you Apache and its modules. But everything that follows your "Then we have..." is not comparable. OpenOffice is fine if you never use any of MS Office's more powerful features. But the whole point of that price tag is that you HAVE those powerful features (and superior documentation) if you need them.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

I don't want to learn how to write scripts, or databases or anything else for that matter.

Often its easier to build a simple database to hold my 250k lines of data than it is to work across 4 tabs in an excel book.

If you're dealing with 250,000 lines of data on a regular basis you shouldn't be using Excel at all, except perhaps as somewhere to export reports to when you're finished. You should definitely learn how to build databases - and not just flat-file ones where you dump a CSV into Access because you've got more than 65,000 rows, but proper ones with multiple tables and primary keys and indexes and relationships. It's a bit of a learning curve but you'll save yourself no end of trouble.

Incidentally, I've no problem whatever with Access for this task, it's exactly what it was designed for. Splitting data across multiple tabs because there are too many rows to fit on just one, that's a sure sign you're doing it wrong.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

And I imagine most of the professors writing books would be employed by a university. So the situation is still pretty much the same. The programmer paycheck isn't coming from selling the software, nor would the writers paycheck come from selling the book.

What's the deal?

Can some people with more experience explain? I went to uni in England. The lecturers wrote stuff up on the board/projector/used powerpoint and handed out a sheet of questions and some pages of notes each week. They suggested one to three suitable textbooks for a course, but that's as far as it went. There were usually a bunch of the library and if the lecturer was suitably ancient, then the books were out of print by a commensurate amount.

Then, there was a big old bunch of final at the end of the thirf and fourth years (first year too, but they didn't count).

I gather that in the US system, it's common to have the course structured around a 3rd party textbook. Is this correct?

Re:What's the deal?

Basically yes. Even if the course isn't structured around a particular book, instructors are going to be receiving pressure from the school to use the latest and greatest book from publisher XYZ that they have a deal with. It is a money issue more than anything. To be fair, some subjects do change often enough that you need to refresh books frequently, but many don't. How long has it been since Algebra or Calculus has changed significantly enough to warrant a new book?

I have never taken a college course that was really structured around the book in a start to finish style. Typically the instructor takes the few sections he wants to use, arranges them how he wants to teach them, and then uses the homework from the book and the grading key to deal with assignments. It keeps everyone at the same reference point.

Re:What's the deal?

Exactly... the US educational system is, like everything else, all about making money. I actually had professors tell us on the first day of class that we needed to have a certain book, but (wink wink) we won't actually use it during the course. Appearently he was being forced to name a text book, but wanted us to return it at our earliest convenience.

Open Source?

What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?

This model can leave room for profit

Textbooks are knowledge. Knowledge should be free. Especially in established subjects. A lot of math doesn't really change much. The textbooks shouldn't have to either. The publishers struggle to keep changing the text so old versions will become irrelevant. They add new problem sets, pretty much. It's their way of squashing the second-hand market.

Publishers should sponsor free Open-Source books. The work has already been done. Improvements and corrections will happen organically and become available as they happen. There is little cost to their upkeep and students will always have access to the most recent version and can update at any time.

Where is the money made? Invest in creating new problem sets that are companions to these open source books. Universities could take them or leave them, but since there is an actual "added value" in putting the effort in to create and verify these problem sets, I think it would be profitiable. Publish and sell these workbooks.

Make old problem sets available online for free. Heck, it'd likely be a tax deduction! Make the answers to these problem-sets available freely and in an obvious way. This will encourage schools to pay for the newest problems sets to discourage cheating.

I honestly think with this model, everyone can win.

Re:Old fashioned way

This assumes that next semester they use the same book. Publishers have been known to make changes every couple of years and discontinue the older version... forcing the professors to upgrade, making the old version obsolete.

Not to mention that I have never seen a buy back for anything close the original sale price.

Re:Old fashioned way

Sell it the next semester? But version 12 is out next semester, and they changed one entire sentence. Of course the professor won't allow your old version 11 book.

Welcome to the world of a book that is now worth 10$, not 200$.

Re:Old fashioned way

My daughter has actually made money on her textbooks the last couple years. She buys them used on half.com and then sells them back to the university bookstore for more than she paid.

Re:They should be free

Why is this?

Because academic texts 400 years ago were mostly written in Latin and modern students don't know Latin?

Re:They should be free

Q.E.D.