University of Minnesota Launches Review Project For Open Textbooks

New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website. The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'" Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.

Re:Well, good.

[cheesybagel]

Uh, I already read stuff like The Prince from Project Guttenberg and it wasn't terrible at all. There is so much literature from the XIXth century or before to read that you would be hard pressed to read it all. Of course they do not sell because they do not cost anything duh.

Re:... join the Math Club

[cheesybagel]

They counted with their hands and feet (base 20 system) if that ain't kewl what is? Of course the thing is, people (particularly journalists) never quite understand the Mayans properly. The thing is just like we have leap years to correct the fact that the year isn't exactly 365 days they had a similar corrective system once a couple of decades were past where they added extra days. These days were in tradition associated with harmful events or whatever so they were usually holydays were people did nothing at all! Then there is the fact that they essentially did not bother extending that basic calendar past a certain year because they saw no use for it (they went extinct like in the XVIth century?). They do have a calendar system which is basically infinite but is seldom used. So the "end of the Mayan calendar" is a bit like the "end of the 32-bit Unix time_t epoch". A big DUH!