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."

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[Anonymous Coward]

"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

[Thelasko]

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

Re:They should be free

[thrillseeker]

Q.E.D.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[db32]

It wasn't an analogy. It was a simple search/replace. You know, like the People and Pandas creationist book after the court ruling. (Now with any luck I have brought religion and creationism into the mix too, muahahahaha!)

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[thedonger]

You are right, the Bible is the perfect open source text book. The science section is a little outdated, but it works great whenever I need to calculate how many sheckles a cubit of grains cost.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[elrous0]

You do now. Nice to meet you.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[meringuoid]

And the ability to link up with access to do some of the larger processing tasks is so useful, not all of us are codemonkeys, and I don't want to learn how to write scripts, or databases or anything else for that matter.

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 seeing your work on thedailywtf in the very near future.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[Anonymous Coward]

The powerful feature of 100% interoperability with MSOffice.

Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ may be the best text editor I've ever used.

I'm sure you meant to say 'vi'