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."
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?
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 where color images are really necessary - like anatomy diagrams - you could have a supplemental online site, or have just those few pages printed in color.
What I hated about buying the $200 book was that the next semester, I could not usually sell it for anywhere near the same price, and often the course that uses it would not be offered or would change editions of the book. I lost a lot of money on textbooks. All for some 300-page color glossy monstrosity of a history text that would have been fine in black and white.
Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They should be free (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:5, Interesting)
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?)
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 .
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.
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.
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:They should be free (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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:1, Interesting)
new revisions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:2, Interesting)
Honest question, never being an MS Office power user, what powerful features is it that are not included in OpenOffice?
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 texts will work, but pretending they're a comparable case to software because they're both OS is laughable and wrong.
Re:Many a foolish man has crossed Houghton Mifflin (Score:3, Interesting)
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?