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> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no excuse fo
by tedmiston 10y ago
> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no excuse for bad books.
This is bad advice.
You need the book for reference or at least will do better with the book most of the time. If you want to stick one to the publisher, buy used.
Textbooks need a "microservices revolution". And not with these crappy interactive DRM-ridden e-textbooks with exercise codes... the experience with most of those is markedly worse than print books. We need more open content like webpages and journal articles. O'Reilly does it best. Textbooks authors should follow / adapt their model.
- 3131s 10y agoGovernments should definitely pay content creators to make open-source curricula for schools and universities. I agree with Stallman that proprietary learning materials are antithetical to the spirit of learning itself. Part of the process of learning is rearranging information, changing it, collectively annotating it, and consuming it through convenient new media (a digitized, hyperlinked document on a open comment platform, for example). There are only limited possibilities with proprietary information in this regard, and even fewer possibilities with proprietary software. Schools should not use either one.