Open-Source College Textbooks Gaining Mindshare 423
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
...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).
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"Who is going to write these open source textbooks? "
Easy... Just look at Wiki. We all know how factual everything is there.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Insightful)
It's certainly not perfect, but it's pretty good considering any fool can edit it.
A textbook would be a lot better. Only edits made my actual professors in a subject would get anywhere near the main branch.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Informative)
So, what parts of Wikipedia do you consider to be fundamentally wrong?
Pointing out exactly what's wrong the problem, isn't it? Sure, most of it is reasonably accurate, but what parts aren't? Who knows when someone who really knows the material last looked at it and corrected the mistakes? At least with a book there are authors (real people, not handles), editors, and dates attached to the editing.
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Umm, let's take a look at the edit track on a Wikipedia article:
(cur) (last) 15:55, 12 August 2008 Mgiganteus1 (Talk | contribs) (53,627 bytes) (rv unnecessary edit)
(cur) (last) 23:20, 9 August 2008 Fenrir-of-the-Shadows (Talk | contribs) (53,635 bytes) (â'Definition)
(cur) (last) 00:27, 8 August 2008 Bob98133 (Talk | contribs) (53,627 bytes) (â'External links remove kiddie EL)
:Mgiganteus1 and Bob98133. Now, I can check up on a textbook author, Prof Soandso,
So the editors are
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Insightful)
And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source programs? Even though programmers don't usually get paid particularly well for their writing, it's unlikely that many programmers are going to want to tackle something as big as the Linux kernel, Apache, or Samba for free.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
Publish or Perish (Score:3, Insightful)
Great idea. And it seems to me that academic writing is more about prestige than money, anyway. I would think that a university would love to brag about how much its professors contributed to the textbooks that their rivals are using.
Finally, there should be a great "public good" argument in favor of this. Universities get a lot of public funding and many have huge treasure chests [nytimes.com] built up. If they help to create great textbooks that are FREELY available to public schools, that would be be a clear public se
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Set up a foundation, financed by Universities, to pay knowledgable people to write the books. Then have the foundation release the results openly.
If you cannot see how that can be good for education, you need to consider the question better.
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Universities are often managed as businesses. Let them act like ones and help their customers.
That's mostly an US-ism only (although, as it happends, US-isms rub on others... ) The very concept of "education industry" makes me hurt.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Informative)
Now...that doesn't EVEN begin to compare the supercomputer and science realm of software that I don't have any experience in. IBM has been giving up tons of stuff to open source at a much lower level than "ooh look at the pretty clicky" user level stuff. The notion that free software doesn't compare to commercial software because you can't play Bioshock on a Linux desktop is laughable.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would consider the COM interface and "VBA compatibility" limitations of Excel, not features. With gnumeric I can write in all sorts of languages -- where's the python interface for Excel?
I don't know what you do with Matlab -- are you really sending thing to Excel for processing, or are you just using it as a data store? And if it's the later what does the Excel interface buy you that you couldn't get with any of the DB interfaces?
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You know I'm a geek and yet I cannot find one single person in the entire world to explain to me just what the fuck Pivot Tables are and why I would want to use them.
You are a geek. I assume therefore that you understand how to write queries in SQL which combine data for you in interesting ways, like say select sum(winnings) from roulette_betting_table group by betting_strategy;
Pivot Tables let stupid people do that in excel.
You could probably use Pivot Tables to count how many of your friends are K++ in the geek code or better, I suppose, if you kept them in an excel spreadsheet.
So, I guess the upshot is: don't bet on roulette? Pick up a book on SQL? Maybe you need som
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Your moderation demonstrates the zealotry (Score:3, Interesting)
First, the open source projects you list are great and I support them.
But your analogy sucks. It's just awful.
You're comparing open source SOFTWARE which can be whipped up on the spot by anyone with the skills and has as it's ONLY requirement that it adheres to its license , to a REFERENCE TEXT that has to be current, researched, sourced, proofread, factchecked, and edited, BEFORE IT CAN BE USED.
They have a saying for that, it's called comparing apples to oranges.
Now I honestly have no idea how well OS tex
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I have done that with a number of small F/OSS projects and at the very least I typically get a polite reply from a developer
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Wait. You're doing something with Excel that's complex enough that you're linking up to Access to 'do some of the larger processing tasks' - I mean, not just to retrieve data, but to process it?
And you say you don't want to learn how to write scripts or databases?
Then I look forward to
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually most of the time I find the OSS software products I use are actually better than the commercial equivalents.
Notepad++ may be the best text editor I've ever used.
K3b is the single best burning app I've ever used.
Amarok is the single best media app I've ever used.
Etc, etc, etc.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are VERY few open software projects that even begin to compare to their commercial equivalents.
What commercial projects are even vaguely similar to Bash, Perl, Python, Ruby? I'd like to see you mention Visual Basic with a straight face.
Commercial apps -- well, some of them have some fancy features that free source apps don't, but those features are only used by 1% of their users. Your favorite subject (photoshop vs gimp) is like comparing a Rolls-Royce to a Camry. Very few people need either the Rolls-Royce or photoshop.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Interesting)
Hell with that.
Imagine a world where current higher education materials are available to ALL OF HUMANITY instead of a select few rich enough to go to college and pay these "rich people only please" prices. Such a move would further destroy the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Also to shoot down the "go to the library" cheap shot done here a lot : Incredibly few college textbooks are in libraries, the few that are are usually 5 or more years out of date.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
Incredibly few subjects change enough in five years to render textbooks out of date.
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...the few that are are usually 5 or more years out of date.
Because Algebra/Geometry/Calculus have changed so much in the past few years...
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Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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They attempt to teach the solution of the day rather than critical analysis of the
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, just imagine it. [mit.edu]
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Re:This is the pushback! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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How long until we see textbooks being "Licensed" instead of sold? How long until BSA-style crackdowns, complete with SWAT teams and tear gas, on secondhand textbook stores?
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I disagree. It would be a possibility if "Professors" were some monolithic guild, but I think they are not. Whilst some might make lots of money from having their books set as required textbooks, the majority of lecturers have no incentive to set proprietary books and in fact have several incentives not to (not having to keep up to date themselves on where information in the book has shifted to this year, is one of those). Hence if a viable alternative to the expensive textbooks appears, the majority will
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Insightful)
A better line item on one's cv would be that one's text book is being taught at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT etc. Should the big schools start moving to open text books, you can bet the academics who are giving any thought to tenure, peer recognition etc. will start contributing in a big way. In the academic world, once you have gained recognitions, the (grant) money can usually be counted on to follow.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Who is going to write these open source textbooks?
Only one person has to take the initiative. After that, the community will make any corrections or updates necessary. That's the beauty of open source.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
What's the deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:What's the deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My book budget for a 3 year UK degree was around £20, for the entire 3 years. I spent more on pens and paper than books. The college library was an excellent resource. This was in the early 1980's so there was no interweb thingy. What is it with the US universities?
(But I did only get a Desmond)
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Before the days of the Internet, my undergraduate university made a deal with the local bookstore - in return for the university making a course textbook a "mandatory purchase", the local bookstore would give a "10% academic discount" on those titles. The university even gave the bookstore a student list so they could check out who qualified for the discount and who had made the purchase.
Otherwise, lecturers just made overhead projection slides and gave out course handouts (with the strange exception of dat
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Only my most introductory undergraduate classes were structured around a particular textbook. I think that was mostly because the classes were very large and they wanted to have some level of homogeneity across years.
Beyond that, most classes had a single recommended textbook and sometimes an optional one or two. People generally thought that the "recommended textbook" absolutely had to be purchased (and sometimes they were right, such as when it was heavily used for homework problems). A handful of classes
Same here in Germany (Score:2)
The older lecturers (which didnt do the lecture for the first time) usually had a script that was either published for printing cost by the faculty (something like 5â), or downloadable from the internet.
The newbies usually said something in the line of "my lecture is based on the books x,y,z".
Which might cause you to buy them, read them in a library. Or just write your own notes during the lecture.
As i have _never_ seen any need for stuff from a certain textbook that wasnt taught in the lecture.
(speaki
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here in the USA college is not about education but about how much money they can suck out of the students and their parents.
They should be free (Score:3, Insightful)
Calculus hasn't changed in like what, 400 years? And yet they keep coming up with new texts all the time. Why is this?
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Because copyright isn't 400 years. Yet.
Re:They should be free (Score:5, Insightful)
Because academic texts 400 years ago were mostly written in Latin and modern students don't know Latin?
Re:They should be free (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They should be free (Score:4, Interesting)
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My Diff EQ. prof actually apologized mid-way through the semester because a new book that was written by a colleague of his (who was supposedly a "top mind" in applied mathematics) had
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Well, in my case I had to get the updated copy of my Calculus book because my Differential Calculus professor was the one who wrote it. You'll not see him advocating free text books any time soon. It didn't help that it wasn't even a particularly good textbook on the subject. My Integral Calculus professor even formed a committee to find alternative textbook. He was not invited back the next year.
Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well something has to be done (Score:4, Insightful)
A friend just dropped 200 bucks on a math book for a fairly low level math course. It was brand new, because of course it was a new revision for this year.
Differences? Bug fixes, essentially. So because they fixed a few of their own errors, he had to spend full price instead of the used price ( which is still a rip off ).
Couldn't he have gotten the old one online for a good price? No, because on the first day of class his professor checks to make sure he has the right book.
If none of this raises anybody's suspicions, I have a bridge for sale. cheap!
Open source vs. gray market (Score:2)
Open source texts are a great idea, but you'll need two things to make them work: (1) credentialed people willing to write and edit them, and (2) companies willing to supply a nicely bound printed version of the text for a reasonable price. Purely online texts won't cut it; reading a highly technical text on a computer screen becomes tiring very quickly.
But let's say someone does write an open source text, and someone else offers you a printed, bound version for $20. The problem is that you're now competi
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but is this a battle about open source textbook knowledge vs. proprietary textbook knowledge, or is this about making critical information available to students at a reasonable cost?
whatever side becomes dominant, gray market or open source, students having access to $20 textbooks is a win for them.
supposing gray market books do take over the market and make selling printed open source text's unfeasible; publishers still can't sell $200 texts in that future.
i am OS supporter, I am not an OS zealot.
I see thi
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(1) credentialed people willing to write and edit them, and
Such as the teacher giving the lectures. You see, mathematics is mathematics, not some branded fashion statement. It remains true or false whether it is written by His Majesty on gold-foil or by a beggar on a piece of lavatory paper. A mathematics course goes through a number of relevant theories, proofs of therems etc - all of which can be found in any number of textbooks. There really is no need to get ripped off.
(2) companies willing to supply a nicely bound printed version of the text for a reasonable price.
Such as the university printer. I remember buying bound lecture notes for about $5 each, writ
At least 14 years of malicious publishing (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1994 there were publishers trying to get professors to order customized textbooks. It was the same type of rip-off shown here: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/Horizon.pdf .
Multimedia CD (Score:3, Insightful)
This model can leave room for profit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Instead of having text books, the prof could just post a series of links to sites that offer the desired info. Maybe it's a wikipedia article, maybe it's a google doc he or a colleague wrote.
NCSU ahead of this... sortof (Score:4, Informative)
Most professors at NC State during my time (1994-2002) we realistic about the books. I was there when books went from cheap to retarded in price. NCSU is currently in the works to prevent books costing over $150 from being a choice, and to prevent teachers who use books they wrote or co-wrote from charging over $50 for it. I doubt it will go through and I'm sure I'm behind the actual state of it.
The worst offender I remember was some douche bag who wrote his own chemistry manual and his WIFE (a non chemist) proof read it. The funniest thing and I couldn't find a link to the picture was the the cover had Avogadro's number on the cover... as
6.023 x 10 -23... yes I said NEGATIVE 23 in bold yellow on glossy paper.
the book had so many mistakes. I'm so glad I wasn't in that class.
Textbook bribes (Score:3)
When my dad was still working as a professor, he had an entire multi-shelf bookcase of nothing but free books being sent on a regular basis as samples that he could order for his class. People would send all sorts of free stuff but towards the end of his career, the free books were arriving fast and furious. If you want a free textbook, I can almost guarantee you could stop by the teacher's place at office hours and either borrow one of their likely many copies of the class book, or simply offer to buy one for cheap. (Note: this works if they didn't write the book for the class)
new revisions (Score:3, Interesting)
Textbook Torrents (Score:3, Informative)
New fashioned way (Score:3, Insightful)
I prefer to download it as a torrent - oh and the solution guide, too, for free.
Who prints them?
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Don't use liquid ink then. Laser toner is vanishingly cheap. If you have the right laser printer, you just stick in a funnel and pour in more.
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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In my years of college, I have never had a professor that wouldn't let you use an older edition of a textbook. I used an old version if my gen chem and organic classes and just copied the questions at the end of the chapter on a photocopier. The professor(s) knew and recommended it if you couldn't afford the newest.
Don't sell back your books at the buyback, sell them on Amazon. I sold a few mechanical engineering books for more than I bought them for, and they were 3 or 4 years old.
Why not local printing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who says you have to print it yourself? When I was in school, some professors assigned course packets that you could pick up at a local printer. They were pretty cheap and looked fine. If a whole class went in together and had them printed in bulk, that would probably drive the price down further.
Of course these were black and white packets. But if you have a field whe
Printing is not that big an issue (Score:4, Interesting)
If theres no copyright issue , most of these opensource books could be printed for $20-30 a copy for a large hardcover book. Private companies could even make a small profit selling the equivalent of "thrift editions" of these text books. They do it already for books in the public domain and furthermore most universities already have on-campus printers.
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1. Presuming that particular textbook is actually useful for the course the next year. I've seen a lot of profs that just practically use the thing as a book of questions.
2. Any particular reason why you feel it needs to be printed out rather than read on a laptop/pda/etc.?
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:4, Interesting)
You can sell it the next quarter for the same price? DAMN, where do you buy books? The best I see around here is about a 10% return.
e-books don't seem problematic:
Lets assume an average of 500 pages a book (it's a bit high, but that hurts rather than helps the example).
Good color printer (can match textbook quality, or beat it) - $600
Toner with color - $200/5000pages (est, $20/book)
Paper - $20/500pages (est, $20/book)
So, $40/book. If the books are $100/ea, you come ahead $60/book.
After 10 books, assuming 3/quarter that's 3-4 quarters, you've made up your investment in the printer.
After 4 years (assuming summers off, that 12 quarters or 36 books), you are 26 books, or $1560 ahead.
Of course, you then have to subtract the cost of the ebook, if you pay for it. From the sound of it though, with an OSB, you probably /wouldn't/ have to pay for it.
You could get a nice waxjet and still do better over the time of a college degree, than buying the books retail.
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:5, Interesting)
My daughter has actually made money on her textbooks the last couple years. She buys them used on half.com and then sells them back to the university bookstore for more than she paid.
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(2) Anyone who sells their books back to the college bookstore is an IDIOT. You are giving up the profit margin to the bookstore. Either sell them straight to the student (surely you know some of your colleagues?) for a few bucks less than they will have to pay the bookstore next semester, or put up a flier on the bulletin boards in the dorms/class buildings, or sell them onli
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And, since it will also be available online, we wouldn't have to carry those oversized books everywhere.
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the world of a book that is now worth 10$, not 200$.
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:4, Insightful)
Why print an e-book? What a monumental waste of paper and ink.
Are you aware that you can read it just fine on the computer, and with the right software you can even annotate the PDF and take notes, right on your computer. Oh, and you can search within the PDF.
Try firing up the search engine on your printed pages.
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That is fine for certain classes. Explain how I can annotate (draw) a Diels Alder cycloaddtion rxn with all the steps with a computer? I guess if you're an IT or business major you could, but this would be useless for about 90% of my chemistry (my major) classes.
No thanks, some classes need a *real* hardcopy, that you can draw in and write on
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Apparently you've never used a full-fledged PDF editor. You can draw anything in a PDF. Aside from that, I'm confused by your statement.
You classes expect you to draw on the textbook and turn the textbook in? Given that many people want to resell their textbook, or buy a textbook, this in insipid. Furthermore, turning in a textbook is even more insipid. I highly doubt your teachers you demand you draw on the textbook, as opposed to note paper.
And given the huge bevy of scientific software out there, I
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You still seem to miss the point. I suggested you shouldn't print out a textbook. You state that you need to draw reactions.
How do these two statements relate?
Either you're insisting you need to draw them directly on the textbook, or you're missing the point.
There is no need to print a 500 page textbook on paper (wasting ink and paper) just because you want to take notes on paper.
You can draw reactions in a notebook, while you keep an e-book on your computer just fine.
Conversely, many colleges and science
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Drawing directly on the textbook, and then taking the time to erase it all is still pretty silly when you can just draw on a notepad.
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what college did you go to where you found a steady flow of idiots to pay "about the same price" for a used textbook?
DMCAU?
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Of course they only buy back as many as they expect to need so if they go to a wholesaler the price drops.