15 ms·

OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

348 points by pome 8y ago

uniqdom 8y ago
You can find those and more here: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ I'm still looking for the sources. I would like to compile them to epub format
- ivan_ah 8y ago
  Oh wow, this is a great aggregator site! Thx for posting. Here are some links to other OER textbooks aggregators from my bookmarks: https://www.cccoer.org/learn/find-oer/open-textbooks/ https://www.cccoer.org/learn/find-oer/open-textbooks/ https://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/14/the-price-is-right-11-excellent-sites-for-free-digital-textbooks.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/14/the-price-i... http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364 http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364 https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse-oer/ https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse-oer/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/mathematics-reviews/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/mathematics-reviews/ https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections
- therealmarv 8y ago
  You can find the sources when you go to the link "view online" which will redirect you to the http://cnx.org http://cnx.org website to all the sources (OpenStax was Connections/CNX in the past). It includes all HTML/XML, images and special styling. Here an example for the algebra book (scroll down to downloads): https://cnx.org/contents/CImQfPDv@3.11:GfaWl1GG@4/Introduction https://cnx.org/contents/CImQfPDv@3.11:GfaWl1GG@4/Introducti... Actually they also produced epub in the past (disclaimer: I worked for them in the past) and I'm sure you can get epub versions from them if you contact them.
  - uniqdom 8y ago
    You mean to download the Offline ZIP, right? that's the main book source?
    - therealmarv 8y ago
      yes, right. They produce the real books, PDF, online version out of this "source code" version.
  - AlphaWeaver 8y ago
    Actually, I emailed back and forth to them about getting ePUB versions a few months ago and they repeatedly refused to offer them. I think they were unhappy with how ePUBs can be rendered on different devices and it was making their render quality lower. Not a great justification for me. Pulling the data out of CNX or whatever and trying to compile into ePUB was fairly difficulty.
- nik61 8y ago
  Have to have a valid Gitbook account to access these works, which is a bit of a mission. I keep getting 401 despite careful, and seemingly error-free, sign-up process.
  - therealmarv 8y ago
    gitbook? There is no gitbook used for official OpenStax books.
rectang 8y ago
> OpenStax at Rice University is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity Good to see that OpenStax is a 501(c)(3) charity, which is the nonprofit classification where donations are tax-deductible and thus restricted. That makes it harder for the organization to be influenced too directly by sponsors, since donations cannot be used for purposes which would yield direct marketplace advantage. I also see that they use a permissive, attribution-based license for their publications. That makes it easier for businesses to consume those materials and also to contribute. https://openstax.org/license https://openstax.org/license > The Creative Commons Attribution license that you and every author must agree to enables the content to be as reusable as possible. The combination of 501(c)(3) and business-friendly licensing reminds me of the Apache Software Foundation. The more orgs using that formula, the better!
- andrepd 8y ago
  I disagree. I would very much prefer a "GPL type" share-alike licence. The basic principle is: I'm releasing this content to the public, with the expectation that anyone that builds upon it will also do the same. Otherwise people can take what I did, use it for their profit, and not contribute back, hurting the overall community. This doesn't seem fair to me.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    For that you have the CC-license family and other similar licenses for artistic creations. The GPL does not strike me as the license to use for text books (since it asks for source code an such) and I think the FSF has state that the GPL isn't a good idea for documentation, I'd carry that to books too.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      share-alike is a reference to a CC license, for example https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
  - rectang 8y ago
ward 8y ago
I like it. For some of these though, I feel like it would be nice if an "order" was established between different books (or the lack thereof mentioned). At least, I do not immediately seem to spot a mention of this. What I mean is that I assume College Physics comes before University Physics, but at what point are you ready to start Astronomy? Also, where does College Physics for AP Courses fit in? (that might be more obvious for Americans?) How about the Biology books, do I need them for Anatomy?
- dak1 8y ago
  Part of the idea behind Connexions (and later OpenStax) is that educational resources are made available under a CC license, and tools are provided so that educators can use, combine, re-write, and modify the educational texts they use. In practice, many choose to use the books as is, as they're already pretty high quality, but if you go to cnx.org and do some searches on the database, you'll find a number of variations that have been created by different professors and universities as well. I don't think the intent (or resources) is there to give you every book for every course in a pre-selected order. Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and OpenStax CNX, although I haven't been there for several years, so my understanding may be out of date.
heydenberk 8y ago
I've often thought that textbooks would be a productive place to focus excess energy among software freedom types. The way I see it, there are at least three ways in which most technology professionals could effectively contribute: - Content production and editing - Improving the design and branding of open textbook purveyors - Advocating for the adoption of open source textbooks in your local K-12 system and community colleges (especially the more cash-strapped ones) I know of no organization that attempts to organize community efforts in these directions, though. If there is one, I'd love to know about it and get involved. If not, maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
- ataturk 8y ago
  Except that many profs write their own textbooks and then market them to a captive audience. I had a chemistry professor in undergrad who had the #1 textbook for the 101/102 level courses. He was a super nice guy, but one could not overlook the business angle there. He saw a niche and filled it with something of very high quality. We have to keep in mind that not every professor is independently wealthy, in fact, most are not. If they can find success marketing their textbooks, they should. Where I draw the line is the insidious behavior of the publishers. Often the authors are as big a victims as the students. So all I ask is that you "everything free" types keep in mind that people should be paid for their hard work. That it doesn't automatically mean someone else is being exploited and it certainly doesn't mean that the result can't still be open source. I am highly skeptical that anything high quality and worthwhile will come from uncompensated authors, editors, and publishers. Nothing ever works like that. And yes, I was in higher ed as an undergrad and graduate student 2x and then as a professor for awhile. I have seen the best and worst of higher ed.
- pome 8y ago
  Maybe CK-12 Foundation[0]? Also CK-12 have FlexBook's[1]. [0] https://www.ck12.org/ https://www.ck12.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexBook
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  I often suggest Wikimedia use their excess money not spent on Wikipedia itself to create low-cost or openly-licensed textbooks. If adopted by schools, students everywhere would save money on textbooks that were high quality. The collection would grow over time as both revenue and donations come in. They might also do something similar to Coursera. Textbooks just seemed like they'd be easier project with large, positive outcome. Plus, some could be updated rarely (eg 5 years) since the content doesn't change much.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
Good to see that they offer free slides for the instructor. Now what's missing for widespread adoption is the online autograding system because at teaching colleges instructors are totally overworked and could not keep up with the weekly assignments even if they wanted to. College textbooks are chosen for the online student assignments, which typically cost the students 50 USD or thereabouts.
- philschatz 8y ago
  There is a homework tool by OpenStax that has auto-graded homework, among other things -- OpenStax Tutor -- it’s for Algebra-based Physics, Introductory Sociology, and Biology courses: https://tutor.openstax.org https://tutor.openstax.org. Also, OpenStax currently has pretty widespread adoption: See http://news.rice.edu/2018/08/01/48-percent-of-colleges-2-2-million-students-using-free-openstax-textbooks-this-year/ http://news.rice.edu/2018/08/01/48-percent-of-colleges-2-2-m... (Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)
chrisper 8y ago
What's the difference between this and cnx.org? It seems tho have more books
- dak1 8y ago
  cnx.org was the URL used when the organization was called Connexions. It was re-branded a few years ago to reflect its growth and expanded missions. Connexions became OpenStax CNX, within the larger OpenStax organization. They are all a part of Rice University and based out of Houston, and have been pursuing the goal of providing open education resources since the 1990s. They're also open source and active on GitHub: https://github.com/Connexions https://github.com/Connexions https://github.com/openstax https://github.com/openstax Source/Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and later OpenStax CNX.
skh 8y ago
I teach mathematics at a community college and use free materials in my courses or use materials that I’ve created. I never use paid materials in my courses. The reason I can do this is because math doesn’t change from year to year. I’m in a subject whose content is static. Even so most open textbooks are quite bad. I’ve only found a few that were really good. Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t change much is hard. There’s a need for publishers but just not a need for one that charges hundreds of dollars for a textbook. It might not be economically feasible to have a publisher put out quality textbooks for less money but I can’t justify forcing my students to spend $200 to $300 per semester on a math textbook.
- lolptdr 8y ago
  I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps we need a curated list with endorsements from those who use it in their own teaching curriculums and another list of users who endorse it.
  - jimhefferon 8y ago
    http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ is useful, I think.
    - jdeisenberg 8y ago
      There’s also this from California: http://cool4ed.org/findetextbooks.html http://cool4ed.org/findetextbooks.html
- krn 8y ago
  > Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t change much is hard. There’s a need for publishers but just not a need for one that charges hundreds of dollars for a textbook. That's what Dover Books[1] and its series on Mathematics[2] are for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Publications [2] http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.html http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.ht...
wowtip 8y ago
Hmm, any technical reason for providing only PDF and no epub format?
- tssva 8y ago
  From their support site. "Do you have .epub versions of your books? We no longer support .epub versions of our OpenStax books. Only a small percentage (around 1 percent) of OpenStax readers reported using the .epub format, and maintaing these versions is costly; instead, we focus on providing our online web view, PDF, iBooks, Amazon, and print versions. You can see what formats are available for your subject at OpenStax.org."
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    > maintaing these versions is costly I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font. They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a single file. Or it's just an online PDF reader. Besides that, iBooks is based on EPUB, and older Kindle files are based on MobiPocket, which is based on OEBPS, the precursor of EPUB. Amazon has gratis software to convert from EPUB to Kindle file format. The print versions are probably functionally identical to PDF, with printing and cutting margins added to the page size. If they maintained the book source in EPUB, all other formats that they do provide are essentially free, and can be maintained with a conversion program, a shell script, and cron job. The real reason is that a lot of the available EPUB readers do not render web pages consistently, and they don't want to test Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc.
    - therealmarv 8y ago
      Hahaha, look closely at the PDF and online version (just look at the math). There are a ton of corner cases which EPUB and especially the EPUB readers do not support. It's definitely not convert into EPUB once and then make books out of it with shell scripts. This is a very wishful thinking of the EPUB standard (which is not a bad standard but it's not that overall solution you are stating here).
ta76567656 8y ago
See also: https://en.wikibooks.org https://en.wikibooks.org
philschatz 8y ago
If you would like to help, the code is open source at https://github.com/openstax https://github.com/openstax and https://github.com/connexions https://github.com/connexions ... Also, OpenStax is hiring! https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/14338 https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/14338 (Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)
- wilsonfiifi 8y ago
  OpenStax CMS[0] is built with Wagtail[1] (Django based CMS framework). This is a good example (live) project to sink my teeth into and learn more about Wagtail. Incidentally does anyone know of any good resources (books, tutorials) to go from beginner to advanced Wagtail developer? [0] https://github.com/openstax/openstax-cms [1] https://wagtail.io/
notafraudster 8y ago
The content here seems fairly good, but from opening a random sample of textbooks, I notice pretty consistently poor presentation and formatting. Almost everything is presented in a wall of single column text with long paragraphs, a small font, and limited in-set visualization. This was especially bad in Intro Sociology and Intro to U.S. Government from what I checked. I found some pagination / page break issues (e.g. page 379 in Intro Statistics is empty and the transition from 381 to 382 also has a weird orphan problem). The same section also has section numbering problems. Edit: Reading more, I see a ton of equations that aren't rendered very well (page 405 in intro stats, look at all of the \bar{x} in the first half -- is this even using LaTeX to render or is this like a bad Microsoft Word equation editor thing?) In the statistics world, OpenIntro Statistics -- https://www.openintro.org/stat/ https://www.openintro.org/stat/ -- seems quite a lot better as a textbook
demonshreder 8y ago
KDE has wiki like collaborative program - https://www.wikitolearn.org/ https://www.wikitolearn.org/

348 points by pome 8y ago

You can find those and more here: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ I'm still looking for the sources. I would like to compile them to epub format

ivan_ah 8y ago
Oh wow, this is a great aggregator site! Thx for posting. Here are some links to other OER textbooks aggregators from my bookmarks: https://www.cccoer.org/learn/find-oer/open-textbooks/ https://www.cccoer.org/learn/find-oer/open-textbooks/ https://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/14/the-price-is-right-11-excellent-sites-for-free-digital-textbooks.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/14/the-price-i... http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364 http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364 https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse-oer/ https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse-oer/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/mathematics-reviews/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/mathematics-reviews/ https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections
therealmarv 8y ago
You can find the sources when you go to the link "view online" which will redirect you to the http://cnx.org http://cnx.org website to all the sources (OpenStax was Connections/CNX in the past). It includes all HTML/XML, images and special styling. Here an example for the algebra book (scroll down to downloads): https://cnx.org/contents/CImQfPDv@3.11:GfaWl1GG@4/Introduction https://cnx.org/contents/CImQfPDv@3.11:GfaWl1GG@4/Introducti... Actually they also produced epub in the past (disclaimer: I worked for them in the past) and I'm sure you can get epub versions from them if you contact them.
- uniqdom 8y ago
  You mean to download the Offline ZIP, right? that's the main book source?
  - therealmarv 8y ago
    yes, right. They produce the real books, PDF, online version out of this "source code" version.
- AlphaWeaver 8y ago
  Actually, I emailed back and forth to them about getting ePUB versions a few months ago and they repeatedly refused to offer them. I think they were unhappy with how ePUBs can be rendered on different devices and it was making their render quality lower. Not a great justification for me. Pulling the data out of CNX or whatever and trying to compile into ePUB was fairly difficulty.
nik61 8y ago
Have to have a valid Gitbook account to access these works, which is a bit of a mission. I keep getting 401 despite careful, and seemingly error-free, sign-up process.
- therealmarv 8y ago
  gitbook? There is no gitbook used for official OpenStax books.

rectang 8y ago

> OpenStax at Rice University is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity Good to see that OpenStax is a 501(c)(3) charity, which is the nonprofit classification where donations are tax-deductible and thus restricted. That makes it harder for the organization to be influenced too directly by sponsors, since donations cannot be used for purposes which would yield direct marketplace advantage. I also see that they use a permissive, attribution-based license for their publications. That makes it easier for businesses to consume those materials and also to contribute. https://openstax.org/license https://openstax.org/license > The Creative Commons Attribution license that you and every author must agree to enables the content to be as reusable as possible. The combination of 501(c)(3) and business-friendly licensing reminds me of the Apache Software Foundation. The more orgs using that formula, the better!

andrepd 8y ago
I disagree. I would very much prefer a "GPL type" share-alike licence. The basic principle is: I'm releasing this content to the public, with the expectation that anyone that builds upon it will also do the same. Otherwise people can take what I did, use it for their profit, and not contribute back, hurting the overall community. This doesn't seem fair to me.
- zaarn 8y ago
  For that you have the CC-license family and other similar licenses for artistic creations. The GPL does not strike me as the license to use for text books (since it asks for source code an such) and I think the FSF has state that the GPL isn't a good idea for documentation, I'd carry that to books too.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    share-alike is a reference to a CC license, for example https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
- rectang 8y ago

ward 8y ago

I like it. For some of these though, I feel like it would be nice if an "order" was established between different books (or the lack thereof mentioned). At least, I do not immediately seem to spot a mention of this. What I mean is that I assume College Physics comes before University Physics, but at what point are you ready to start Astronomy? Also, where does College Physics for AP Courses fit in? (that might be more obvious for Americans?) How about the Biology books, do I need them for Anatomy?

dak1 8y ago
Part of the idea behind Connexions (and later OpenStax) is that educational resources are made available under a CC license, and tools are provided so that educators can use, combine, re-write, and modify the educational texts they use. In practice, many choose to use the books as is, as they're already pretty high quality, but if you go to cnx.org and do some searches on the database, you'll find a number of variations that have been created by different professors and universities as well. I don't think the intent (or resources) is there to give you every book for every course in a pre-selected order. Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and OpenStax CNX, although I haven't been there for several years, so my understanding may be out of date.

heydenberk 8y ago

I've often thought that textbooks would be a productive place to focus excess energy among software freedom types. The way I see it, there are at least three ways in which most technology professionals could effectively contribute: - Content production and editing - Improving the design and branding of open textbook purveyors - Advocating for the adoption of open source textbooks in your local K-12 system and community colleges (especially the more cash-strapped ones) I know of no organization that attempts to organize community efforts in these directions, though. If there is one, I'd love to know about it and get involved. If not, maybe it's an idea whose time has come.

ataturk 8y ago
Except that many profs write their own textbooks and then market them to a captive audience. I had a chemistry professor in undergrad who had the #1 textbook for the 101/102 level courses. He was a super nice guy, but one could not overlook the business angle there. He saw a niche and filled it with something of very high quality. We have to keep in mind that not every professor is independently wealthy, in fact, most are not. If they can find success marketing their textbooks, they should. Where I draw the line is the insidious behavior of the publishers. Often the authors are as big a victims as the students. So all I ask is that you "everything free" types keep in mind that people should be paid for their hard work. That it doesn't automatically mean someone else is being exploited and it certainly doesn't mean that the result can't still be open source. I am highly skeptical that anything high quality and worthwhile will come from uncompensated authors, editors, and publishers. Nothing ever works like that. And yes, I was in higher ed as an undergrad and graduate student 2x and then as a professor for awhile. I have seen the best and worst of higher ed.
pome 8y ago
Maybe CK-12 Foundation[0]? Also CK-12 have FlexBook's[1]. [0] https://www.ck12.org/ https://www.ck12.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexBook
nickpsecurity 8y ago
I often suggest Wikimedia use their excess money not spent on Wikipedia itself to create low-cost or openly-licensed textbooks. If adopted by schools, students everywhere would save money on textbooks that were high quality. The collection would grow over time as both revenue and donations come in. They might also do something similar to Coursera. Textbooks just seemed like they'd be easier project with large, positive outcome. Plus, some could be updated rarely (eg 5 years) since the content doesn't change much.

HarryHirsch 8y ago

Good to see that they offer free slides for the instructor. Now what's missing for widespread adoption is the online autograding system because at teaching colleges instructors are totally overworked and could not keep up with the weekly assignments even if they wanted to. College textbooks are chosen for the online student assignments, which typically cost the students 50 USD or thereabouts.

philschatz 8y ago
There is a homework tool by OpenStax that has auto-graded homework, among other things -- OpenStax Tutor -- it’s for Algebra-based Physics, Introductory Sociology, and Biology courses: https://tutor.openstax.org https://tutor.openstax.org. Also, OpenStax currently has pretty widespread adoption: See http://news.rice.edu/2018/08/01/48-percent-of-colleges-2-2-million-students-using-free-openstax-textbooks-this-year/ http://news.rice.edu/2018/08/01/48-percent-of-colleges-2-2-m... (Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)

chrisper 8y ago

What's the difference between this and cnx.org? It seems tho have more books

dak1 8y ago
cnx.org was the URL used when the organization was called Connexions. It was re-branded a few years ago to reflect its growth and expanded missions. Connexions became OpenStax CNX, within the larger OpenStax organization. They are all a part of Rice University and based out of Houston, and have been pursuing the goal of providing open education resources since the 1990s. They're also open source and active on GitHub: https://github.com/Connexions https://github.com/Connexions https://github.com/openstax https://github.com/openstax Source/Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and later OpenStax CNX.

skh 8y ago

I teach mathematics at a community college and use free materials in my courses or use materials that I’ve created. I never use paid materials in my courses. The reason I can do this is because math doesn’t change from year to year. I’m in a subject whose content is static. Even so most open textbooks are quite bad. I’ve only found a few that were really good. Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t change much is hard. There’s a need for publishers but just not a need for one that charges hundreds of dollars for a textbook. It might not be economically feasible to have a publisher put out quality textbooks for less money but I can’t justify forcing my students to spend $200 to $300 per semester on a math textbook.

lolptdr 8y ago
I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps we need a curated list with endorsements from those who use it in their own teaching curriculums and another list of users who endorse it.
- jimhefferon 8y ago
  http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ is useful, I think.
  - jdeisenberg 8y ago
    There’s also this from California: http://cool4ed.org/findetextbooks.html http://cool4ed.org/findetextbooks.html
krn 8y ago
> Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t change much is hard. There’s a need for publishers but just not a need for one that charges hundreds of dollars for a textbook. That's what Dover Books[1] and its series on Mathematics[2] are for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Publications [2] http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.html http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.ht...

wowtip 8y ago

Hmm, any technical reason for providing only PDF and no epub format?

tssva 8y ago
From their support site. "Do you have .epub versions of your books? We no longer support .epub versions of our OpenStax books. Only a small percentage (around 1 percent) of OpenStax readers reported using the .epub format, and maintaing these versions is costly; instead, we focus on providing our online web view, PDF, iBooks, Amazon, and print versions. You can see what formats are available for your subject at OpenStax.org."
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  > maintaing these versions is costly I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font. They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a single file. Or it's just an online PDF reader. Besides that, iBooks is based on EPUB, and older Kindle files are based on MobiPocket, which is based on OEBPS, the precursor of EPUB. Amazon has gratis software to convert from EPUB to Kindle file format. The print versions are probably functionally identical to PDF, with printing and cutting margins added to the page size. If they maintained the book source in EPUB, all other formats that they do provide are essentially free, and can be maintained with a conversion program, a shell script, and cron job. The real reason is that a lot of the available EPUB readers do not render web pages consistently, and they don't want to test Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc.
  - therealmarv 8y ago
    Hahaha, look closely at the PDF and online version (just look at the math). There are a ton of corner cases which EPUB and especially the EPUB readers do not support. It's definitely not convert into EPUB once and then make books out of it with shell scripts. This is a very wishful thinking of the EPUB standard (which is not a bad standard but it's not that overall solution you are stating here).

ta76567656 8y ago

See also: https://en.wikibooks.org https://en.wikibooks.org

philschatz 8y ago

If you would like to help, the code is open source at https://github.com/openstax https://github.com/openstax and https://github.com/connexions https://github.com/connexions ... Also, OpenStax is hiring! https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/14338 https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/14338 (Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)

wilsonfiifi 8y ago
OpenStax CMS[0] is built with Wagtail[1] (Django based CMS framework). This is a good example (live) project to sink my teeth into and learn more about Wagtail. Incidentally does anyone know of any good resources (books, tutorials) to go from beginner to advanced Wagtail developer? [0] https://github.com/openstax/openstax-cms [1] https://wagtail.io/

notafraudster 8y ago

The content here seems fairly good, but from opening a random sample of textbooks, I notice pretty consistently poor presentation and formatting. Almost everything is presented in a wall of single column text with long paragraphs, a small font, and limited in-set visualization. This was especially bad in Intro Sociology and Intro to U.S. Government from what I checked. I found some pagination / page break issues (e.g. page 379 in Intro Statistics is empty and the transition from 381 to 382 also has a weird orphan problem). The same section also has section numbering problems. Edit: Reading more, I see a ton of equations that aren't rendered very well (page 405 in intro stats, look at all of the \bar{x} in the first half -- is this even using LaTeX to render or is this like a bad Microsoft Word equation editor thing?) In the statistics world, OpenIntro Statistics -- https://www.openintro.org/stat/ https://www.openintro.org/stat/ -- seems quite a lot better as a textbook

demonshreder 8y ago

KDE has wiki like collaborative program - https://www.wikitolearn.org/ https://www.wikitolearn.org/