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).
Old fashioned way (Score:1, Insightful)
I prefer to buy a $200 textbook and sell it the next semester for about the same price instead of downloading the e-book and printing out the pages!
Printing an e-book (legal or illegal) is more expensive; printer cartridges are as expensive and the quality is nowhere near a real textbook.
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, Insightful)
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?
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?
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.
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They should be free (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
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.
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!
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
From an insider (Score:1, Insightful)
Listen, I've worked for the largest educational publishers in the world both in NJ and in Australia.
Here's the deal. We sell a product with educational content, but it's a product. We do a damn good job trying to bundle subscription services with books in order to crush the use of used books. We demand that profs use the online services to assign work for credit in order to make the books essential. We put out new editions every three years and, depending on the subject, they're the same with some minor changes and a cool new cover.
Now I don't happen to think this is a crime or unethical - IT IS A BUSINESS and we want to sell books. I've made a nice six-figure salary doing it and like my job.
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?
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:2, Insightful)
...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...
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, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Old fashioned way (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well something has to be done (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I did have classes where the old editions wouldn't cut it, namely math, stat and accounting classes.
Most of my professors made it clear whether an old edition would suffice or not.
What about OOo's features? (Score:1, Insightful)
Such as connecting to a REAL database, rather than a toy one?
How about proper language support?
How about simple licensing?
PDF export?
MathML/LaTeX?
Ease of inclusion in assistive technologies (because it is a properly formed XML type)?
Most of the "advanced" features are VERY POOR imitations of the functions in a DTP program.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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 (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.
Re:This is the pushback! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 take it once the concept has sunk in.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:1, Insightful)
You can spend 2 weeks learning all that stuff and get fired for not getting your work done, or spend an hour playing around in excel/access and get the same stuff done without getting fired. Take your pick of what most people will do...
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
I work at a major textbook wholesaler (Score:2, Insightful)
and it is indeed a huge racket. We buy books by the truckload for (relatively) cheap, sell them to both bookstores and directly to students online. Buyback gives them a small fraction of it back (beer money for semester break), then the books get sold again. Lather, rinse, repeat until the book is too outdated or too ragged. We offer no kickbacks to any professor to promote any book or version. That may perhaps be done on a more local level.
There are many profs that have published their own dead tree textbooks, but they are usually only a niche market for their own school. A true open-source Etext could surely be useful, but could eventually have Wikipedia-type battles on content. All textbooks have a slant, and it could be problematic to accommodate all. Maybe you could have a filter in your reader? "Click here for the Darwinistic version, click here for Creationist version".
Keeping multiple copies of the same book in the multiple revisions is a pain. The various profs want to teach from different versions, so we must keep old versions indefinitely. Handling and tracking large amounts of books is a huge, labor-intensive problem (and we have quite a bit of automation as well).
We are dipping our toe into the Ebook waters cautiously. It makes sense in many ways as far as shipping and handling, but removes the gravy train of buyback. I wonder how many will lose their Ebook to Windows crashes (hey, this is /. we need some Anti-Windows content). They can download them again for free, providing they have proof of purchase (which may have also disappeared in the Windows crash).
I wonder that if/when the DRM gets cracked, and one kid can sell 500 copies of the textbook for $10 how that will affect the concept.
Re:Universities paying for the textbook developmen (Score:3, Insightful)
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:2, Insightful)
It's certainly not perfect, but it's pretty good considering any fool can edit it.
..... and most do. LOL
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:2, Insightful)
how many sheckles a cubit of grains cost.
Isn't a cubit a measure of length? I think you meant cubic cubits.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I suspect (Score:3, Insightful)
They attempt to teach the solution of the day rather than critical analysis of the problem itself. Imagine a math class that only taught how to use the popular counting technology of the day. Abacus, adding machine, calculator, computer, etc. You would be forever stuck in a cycle. Or you just teach the math and allow for new solutions to calculating said math to come about.
In the CS realm, why focus on a specific example of a buffer overflow. Buffer overflows themselves pretty much are all the same, just different specific implementations, but the problem itself is basically the same.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
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 some more geeky friends, or you could add "aspiring" to your geek appellation.
Oops, this is slashdot, and I responded in kind. What I meant to say is: "Don't be deliberately stupid, it gives geeks a bad name. Pivot Tables are useful to finance people and others who want to combine and analyze financial data in Excel."
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 service to justify taxpayer support.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Insightful)
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, but Bob98133? Who the heck is that?
So the editors are