11 ms·

In Praise of Open Source Textbooks

506 points by lightveil 5y ago

I have recently been using the Linear Algebra book by Jim Hefferon to study the subject. This is because I'm taking a linear algebra course in college, I am visually impaired, and the books I get from college are literally unusable. As a person who has to use a Screen Reader, math in PDFs is almost impossible to read for me. The problem is almost insurmountable if the PDF is a collection of images, but even if it is a LaTeX-generated PDF, reading anything but the simplest of equations is very, very hard. In these cases, having the LaTeX source to read is a godsend. To the authors who publish the source of their books: thank you, thank you. I cannot express how grateful I am. To anyone who is related to /working in the publisher space: it would be incredibly useful if there was a process to get the LaTeX source of books upon request, although I understand how copyrights/etc might make this difficult. Some other books I would like to point out for being open source: Apex Calculus, Open Data Structures.

dehrmann 5y ago
I have no idea how commercial textbooks for anything up to specialized, college-level classes are viable. You'd think that enough states (and countries) would put the work into the Wikibooks calculus book so it meets their standards and just use that.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  In other countries textbooks are cheap because (as you say) the subject matter is more or less agreed-upon so there are just a few different textbooks largely distinguished by the quality of the writing and presentation. In the US students are treated as a captive audience and publishers work hard to get professors and education authorities to specify particular books, which are then sold at a very high mark-up. The incentives ought to be purely academic but in practice are often material or financial.
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    And they make sure to publish new editions with relatively minor changes every few years. Then they sell a Chem 101 text for $175. It's like the price is inverse to the number of readers.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Yeah. I'm not quite sure how it works in the US, but here in the UK we have strong student unions that often have a good relationship with the university whose students they represent. I think any professor attempting this would get shut down pretty quickly.
    - kwhitefoot 5y ago
      The word union is anathema to many in the US.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I don't get it, either. I laugh when schools complain their textbooks are "old and outdated". So what? Has there been a revolution in algebra I didn't hear about? I also laugh when teachers say they expend all this effort making "lesson plans". There are 3.7 million teachers just in the U.S. You'd think they could share them?
  - detaro 5y ago
    Not all subjects have the luxury of being so isolated from changes in the real world.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Let's see. Science? Nope. History? Nope. Exercise? Nope. Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope. Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.
      - pgalvin 5y ago
        It is laughable to suggest that history does not change. Even studying history at the equivalent of high school had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving. I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        > is constantly evolving Being an amateur historian myself, most of that smacks of political fashion. The (very) shallow view of history taught by K-12 doesn't need to change. The War of 1812 hasn't moved to 1814 yet. Hitler still lost WW2. Edison still invented the first practical lightbulb, despite all the attempts to dethrone him :-)
        TchoBeer 5y ago
        The war of 1812 ended in 1815
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  While there are certainly incentive problems and simple cruft in that regard[1]... Generally, writing textbooks is just hard and nobody really knows how to do it. Textbooks as they are usually understood[2] are, above all, books[3], that is, large flowing pieces of prose that tell a story about an area of knowledge in a generally linear manner. This is not how knowledge works. At least the way I feel my knowledge is organized when I try to explain things is that I have a sprawling weighted (on a scale from “vague association” to “hard prerequisite”) graph with rather compact ideas as vertices of absolutely enormous degree (at least in regions I feel I have a decent understanding of). Only by several iterations of merciless pruning around the desired generating set can I get a subgraph that is concise enough that I have some hope of explaining it in the available time, parsimonious enough that I can toposort it onto the time axis without people’s heads spinning and stacks overflowing, and comprehensive enough that I don’t feel I’ve given people a horribly skewed impression and don’t risk choosing a perspective so narrow that would fail to engage some of them. Then comes the actual work of (choosing a) linearization, which I can kind of do in my head for stories of no more than a couple hours at the cost of something like 15 minutes of confusion-inducing backtracking per hour, but it gets exponentially harder as you go past these limits, and you have to go pretty far past them to reach good writing. All of these decisions are kind of like those in an optimizing compiler in that they really want to feed into each other, but actually letting them do so would cause the process to come to a grinding halt, so you interate and order and apply vague heuristics and make arbitrary choices and your inner perfectionist hates you the whole time you’re doing it. And you get to do this practically from scratch every single time because the given context and the desired focus are virtually never the same. You might say at this point that this is what I get for choosing a wire representation (books and more generally stories) so unlike the in-memory representation (graphs of associations). That may be true to some extent[4], but it’s also important to realize that what is best for knowledge storage doesn’t have to be any good for knowledge acquisition[5]. In fact, the omission that bothers me most of the ones I made in the book-writing rant above is that I know of some things that are just so cute and smol sitting in my head, but when I try to get them out I either assume so many prerequisites that there’s nothing to get out or end up staring at a plan for what is at best a terse twenty-page essay I’m never going to write. I wish hard for viable alternatives to linear narrative, but I also realize I haven’t encountered any that were nearly as good or universally applicable. You can certainly point people at a pile of short-form hypertext, but that misses the issue of pruning: doing it effectively requires you to already know things you decide to prune and the general layout of the subject on a level that is, in classroom terms, several years beyond what you are trying to isolate; a learner is incapable of doing this or at the very least is going to waste tremendous amounts of time doing a mediocre job of it. (I certainly did when I was learning maths from Wikipedia.) I don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s intellectual capability here, or even dissuade them from literature surfing. Surfing in moderation is useful and efficient. I’m only saying that the apparently obvious solution of switching out books for a hyperlinked card catalogue fails and fails hard. Teaching and books are hard and nobody really knows the secret to doing them well, even those who are brilliant at them. There are a lot of arbitrary choices (not really, but heavily reader-dependent, including factors unknowable to the writer or even the reader) involved in making a book. We solve that problem by throwing a lot of them at the audience and seeing what sticks to whom. But that means a perfect book is impossible—not “drink the ocean” impossible, but “draw a round square” impossible[6]. The problem doesn’t even make sense; what’s a perfect book to you can be a hideous book to me, and what’s a perfect book for me right now was an impenetrable book for me ten years ago. There are objectively good books and objectively bad books, but objectively perfect is something a book cannot be. [1]: Nobody is going to count your Wikibooks contributions towards your tenure; also, Wikibooks and MediaWiki in general managed to find that sweet spot where they’re simultaneously so expressive you can’t reliably process them automatically and so limited they don’t make good self-contained books, neither fixed nor reflowable. [2]: Let’s say pre-1970—I find modern trends in English-language secondary and basic undergrad texts positively cringeworthy, but I haven’t ever had to use them in either capacity. [3]: Can’t help but be reminded here of Michele Audin’s deliciously snarky Tautology 2.3.1 from “Conseils aux auteurs des textes mathématiques”, <http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~maudin/newhowto.ps http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~maudin/newhowto.ps>. [4]: The only tool or process I’ve found which is even remotely adapted to this data model is TiddlyWiki <https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/>, which I tried, but never could get over its many quirks and primitive organizational features to make it useful even for notes to myself, let alone as an interface with others. [5]: For example, fluent readers of Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-script languages generally work by recognizing shapes of words on a page, often for several words in parallel, but teaching children or non-Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-literate adults to read this way is a famously useless affair. [6]: This also means mandatory texts for students and even mandated curricula for teachers are an atrocity which sacrifices a whole lot of adaptation capability for a modest bit of ease in detecting incompetence and bad faith. The more often a curriculum is nailed down to the time axis with tests and metrics the worse it is.
enriquto 5y ago
not about the subjects that you mention, but if you ever need to learn probability and inference, this is easily among the best books on the subject: http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html if you read the latex source, there are even some easter eggs in the comments
adolph 5y ago
There is a lot of knowledge where the world would benefit from a basic level of open ubiquity and the participation of experts who might be incented to contribute in a manner similar to Wikipedia. Here are two publishers releasing in the open: https://www.openintro.org/ https://www.openintro.org/ https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/
HDMI_Cable 5y ago
It would be nice to have this thread as a "collection" place for different open textbooks. I personally use OpenStacks, they're quite good. https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/
- myself248 5y ago
  This is my favorite text on electronics, open or otherwise: https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ The explanation of impedance (volume II, chapter 14) was the first one that made intuitive sense to me, after struggling with the concept for years. The whole thing is beautiful, but that chapter especially.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  The thing that disappoints me about Openstax is that, while they're free/libre, they don't seem to be open source anymore. They used to provide access to the raw XML (CNXML) used to generate the books, but I can't find that anywhere. It would be nice if there was something like OpenStax, maybe even a fork of it, that could be held in a Git repo and anyone could make pull requests.
  - empyrical 5y ago
    It looks like they're transitioning/have transitioned to editing the books with Google Docs: https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx
- miki123211 5y ago
  Openstax is the best source of extremely high-quality alt descriptions I've ever found. If you need inspiration for good alt descriptions of STEM / computer science / software engineering related images, just look at how Openstax does it. I'm a screen reader user myself and I'm very impressed.
- j-james 5y ago
  I highly recommend Interactive Linear Algebra for learning undergrad-level linear algebra mostly in the R^N. It has a PDF version available, but the real magic is in the interactive embedded 2D and 3D visualizations. There's a couple of variations available - it was written by some professors at Georgia Tech, one of which moved to Duke and teaches off of it there - but the UBC version is my favorite, as it makes some changes in the lesson order to teach vectors before matrices. https://www.math.ubc.ca/~tbjw/ila https://www.math.ubc.ca/~tbjw/ila
bluenose69 5y ago
I had a student with limited vision in a class once, who had a reader. Luckily, I had written the course notes (basically a textbook) in latex. I consulted with the student and saw how the reader worked. All was fine, but it was slow because it said e.g. "backslash begin open brace equation close brace", so I made a perlscript to remove backslash and braces (and a few other things) and then it all worked really well. People, especially those who don't use mathematics much, think latex is hard for humans. I think exactly the reverse is true.
- gjvnq 5y ago
  Basic scripting is such a powerful tool, it's sad that so few people know how to use it.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Every now and again there is a push to "democratise computing for all!". I think, scripting. It is just scripting.
sodality2 5y ago
We use openstax currently in our AP Biology class. It's incredible to not have to scroll through a scanned PDF for an obscure 2010 textbook. In addition, the questions that we are assigned are completely unique so I don't believe that this will contribute to the (very pervasive) problem of cheating. I donated to Openstax as well: https://riceconnect.rice.edu/donation/support-openstax https://riceconnect.rice.edu/donation/support-openstax
533474 5y ago
When I publish my book, I will also publish the source. Knowledge is universal. Praise all the authors who release their sources.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I publish all my code these days as Open Source.
pbsds 5y ago
Could a equation OCR system like [1] be combined with a screen reader? It seems to support asciimath [1]: https://mathpix.com/ocr https://mathpix.com/ocr
- lightveil 5y ago
  this looks interesting, and I think would be perfect for the kind of stuff I deal with. Unfortunately, the pricing looks less interesting (about $100 for a 1000 page pdf, if I'm reading it right, although possibly I could attempt to break the pdf up into pages which have the math). There was an older solution for this which costs about $200 as a whole. Stuff like this exists, and is possibly pretty reasonable monetarily, but not being in the U.S., exchange rates hit me hard. I've bookmarked this and will look into this more, though, thanks!
  - lurker137 5y ago
    There is an option for 5000 snips per month for $5. If you annotate the pdf every time you convert to latex, it should be much cheaper
pfortuny 5y ago
Oh, I had never thought about this. Thanks, shall see what I can do. I never thought the latex source would make any sense to anyone but me
jimhefferon 5y ago
> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org https://www.tug.org.)
- lightveil 5y ago
  Oh, that's very good to hear! I'll definitely get in contact. I won't be able to, for the next two months or so, but after that I should have some free time when I can test/contribute with code/whatever else is required. (Hopefully, if this gets done, publishers that use LaTeX for typesetting might automatically offer accessible PDFs as well.)
  - jimhefferon 5y ago
    Sometimes being a resource for developers, as someone who could be asked, can be valuable. Anyway, good luck with your studies!
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Just wanted to say my thanks as well, while I have not worked with one of your books, I have a lot of respect for people that choose to release the source of textbooks they created.
  - jimhefferon 5y ago
    You are welcome. Have a look at https://hefferon.net https://hefferon.net for the other books.
- busyant 5y ago
  > interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction Can you elaborate on what / where those projects are? It's not clear from the tug.org website. I love LaTeX and if I had a relevant skill set I'd be willing to help out. Thank you.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
This is pretty interesting. You should also consider cross-posting this request in other teaching communities, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/ https://www.reddit.com/r/matheducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/matheducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceTeachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceTeachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CSEducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CSEducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
miki123211 5y ago
Many books/websites let you view the Latex code, despite not technically being open source. If a website uses MathJax, you can change the renderer to "plain source" by opening the context menu on any math equation. "Paul's Math notes"[1] is a good example, and a really great free website for college-level math. If you're a screen reader user, the context menu may not open for reasons unknown. Try routing your mouse to the equation and simulate a right mouse click, that should do it. Moving your focus to the equation with the tab key may also be an option. Alternatively, you can just use Voice Over for MacOS, it can do it just fine.
- lightveil 5y ago
  Yup, I have been using this extensively. Paul's notes are something I forgot to mention-I referred to them almost daily, back when I was taking the equivalent of Calculus 1, and they're still very useful now that I'm taking differential equations. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work on OpenStax-I can't get LaTeX, all I can get is MathML, and that's not very easy to read. There's a way to navigate the math (using something called mathplayer), but it's quite inefficient as compared to LaTeX, specially as I go into higher math. The books are still very, very good, though.
  - miki123211 5y ago
    Try playing with Mathjax's own accessibility settings. Not sure how well that works on Openstax, will work well if they're using Mathjax 3, badly otherwise. Alternatively play with MathPlayer's settings (in the control panel), some of the other reading modes work better in certain contexts. If you can, also try VoiceOver on the Mac, it has its own math support, which works pretty well. We seem to be in similar situations, if you want to share tips or something, my hn username at gmail dot com.
acabal 5y ago
Have you tried any epubs with MathML? If so how do they compare?
gnicholas 5y ago
FYI, if you are a student with a 'qualifying print disability' (which includes visual impairment, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities), you may be able to get free access to hundreds of thousands of books/textbooks via Bookshare. [1] They get digital versions of books from the publishers and make them accessible to people with print disabilities. This means adding image descriptions and offering various text alterations (different text sizes, special fonts and colors, etc.) to make them easier to read. They also offer math-based tools to make equations accessible. Bookshare is 100% free to any US-based student who qualifies, and various other countries have agreements with Bookshare as well. They are part of the tech-for-good nonprofit Benetech and are based out of Palo Alto. 1: http://www.bookshare.org http://www.bookshare.org.
pickdig 5y ago
jeff erickson's 'algorithms, etc.' is the textbook for our university's algo class. it's brilliant. in case, link: https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/ https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/
claudiot 5y ago
I would like to add only a link to a public organization that is working on the problem. Have a look here https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/ https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/
chrisMyzel 5y ago
I remember seeing a (trained) image-to-text approach that claimed to translate scanned math equations to latex sourcecode. Might be 3-4 weeks ago here on HN.

506 points by lightveil 5y ago

dehrmann 5y ago

I have no idea how commercial textbooks for anything up to specialized, college-level classes are viable. You'd think that enough states (and countries) would put the work into the Wikibooks calculus book so it meets their standards and just use that.

anigbrowl 5y ago
In other countries textbooks are cheap because (as you say) the subject matter is more or less agreed-upon so there are just a few different textbooks largely distinguished by the quality of the writing and presentation. In the US students are treated as a captive audience and publishers work hard to get professors and education authorities to specify particular books, which are then sold at a very high mark-up. The incentives ought to be purely academic but in practice are often material or financial.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  And they make sure to publish new editions with relatively minor changes every few years. Then they sell a Chem 101 text for $175. It's like the price is inverse to the number of readers.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm not quite sure how it works in the US, but here in the UK we have strong student unions that often have a good relationship with the university whose students they represent. I think any professor attempting this would get shut down pretty quickly.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    The word union is anathema to many in the US.
WalterBright 5y ago
I don't get it, either. I laugh when schools complain their textbooks are "old and outdated". So what? Has there been a revolution in algebra I didn't hear about? I also laugh when teachers say they expend all this effort making "lesson plans". There are 3.7 million teachers just in the U.S. You'd think they could share them?
- detaro 5y ago
  Not all subjects have the luxury of being so isolated from changes in the real world.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Let's see. Science? Nope. History? Nope. Exercise? Nope. Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope. Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.
    - pgalvin 5y ago
      It is laughable to suggest that history does not change. Even studying history at the equivalent of high school had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving. I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > is constantly evolving Being an amateur historian myself, most of that smacks of political fashion. The (very) shallow view of history taught by K-12 doesn't need to change. The War of 1812 hasn't moved to 1814 yet. Hitler still lost WW2. Edison still invented the first practical lightbulb, despite all the attempts to dethrone him :-)
        TchoBeer 5y ago
        The war of 1812 ended in 1815
mananaysiempre 5y ago
While there are certainly incentive problems and simple cruft in that regard[1]... Generally, writing textbooks is just hard and nobody really knows how to do it. Textbooks as they are usually understood[2] are, above all, books[3], that is, large flowing pieces of prose that tell a story about an area of knowledge in a generally linear manner. This is not how knowledge works. At least the way I feel my knowledge is organized when I try to explain things is that I have a sprawling weighted (on a scale from “vague association” to “hard prerequisite”) graph with rather compact ideas as vertices of absolutely enormous degree (at least in regions I feel I have a decent understanding of). Only by several iterations of merciless pruning around the desired generating set can I get a subgraph that is concise enough that I have some hope of explaining it in the available time, parsimonious enough that I can toposort it onto the time axis without people’s heads spinning and stacks overflowing, and comprehensive enough that I don’t feel I’ve given people a horribly skewed impression and don’t risk choosing a perspective so narrow that would fail to engage some of them. Then comes the actual work of (choosing a) linearization, which I can kind of do in my head for stories of no more than a couple hours at the cost of something like 15 minutes of confusion-inducing backtracking per hour, but it gets exponentially harder as you go past these limits, and you have to go pretty far past them to reach good writing. All of these decisions are kind of like those in an optimizing compiler in that they really want to feed into each other, but actually letting them do so would cause the process to come to a grinding halt, so you interate and order and apply vague heuristics and make arbitrary choices and your inner perfectionist hates you the whole time you’re doing it. And you get to do this practically from scratch every single time because the given context and the desired focus are virtually never the same. You might say at this point that this is what I get for choosing a wire representation (books and more generally stories) so unlike the in-memory representation (graphs of associations). That may be true to some extent[4], but it’s also important to realize that what is best for knowledge storage doesn’t have to be any good for knowledge acquisition[5]. In fact, the omission that bothers me most of the ones I made in the book-writing rant above is that I know of some things that are just so cute and smol sitting in my head, but when I try to get them out I either assume so many prerequisites that there’s nothing to get out or end up staring at a plan for what is at best a terse twenty-page essay I’m never going to write. I wish hard for viable alternatives to linear narrative, but I also realize I haven’t encountered any that were nearly as good or universally applicable. You can certainly point people at a pile of short-form hypertext, but that misses the issue of pruning: doing it effectively requires you to already know things you decide to prune and the general layout of the subject on a level that is, in classroom terms, several years beyond what you are trying to isolate; a learner is incapable of doing this or at the very least is going to waste tremendous amounts of time doing a mediocre job of it. (I certainly did when I was learning maths from Wikipedia.) I don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s intellectual capability here, or even dissuade them from literature surfing. Surfing in moderation is useful and efficient. I’m only saying that the apparently obvious solution of switching out books for a hyperlinked card catalogue fails and fails hard. Teaching and books are hard and nobody really knows the secret to doing them well, even those who are brilliant at them. There are a lot of arbitrary choices (not really, but heavily reader-dependent, including factors unknowable to the writer or even the reader) involved in making a book. We solve that problem by throwing a lot of them at the audience and seeing what sticks to whom. But that means a perfect book is impossible—not “drink the ocean” impossible, but “draw a round square” impossible[6]. The problem doesn’t even make sense; what’s a perfect book to you can be a hideous book to me, and what’s a perfect book for me right now was an impenetrable book for me ten years ago. There are objectively good books and objectively bad books, but objectively perfect is something a book cannot be. [1]: Nobody is going to count your Wikibooks contributions towards your tenure; also, Wikibooks and MediaWiki in general managed to find that sweet spot where they’re simultaneously so expressive you can’t reliably process them automatically and so limited they don’t make good self-contained books, neither fixed nor reflowable. [2]: Let’s say pre-1970—I find modern trends in English-language secondary and basic undergrad texts positively cringeworthy, but I haven’t ever had to use them in either capacity. [3]: Can’t help but be reminded here of Michele Audin’s deliciously snarky Tautology 2.3.1 from “Conseils aux auteurs des textes mathématiques”, <http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~maudin/newhowto.ps http://irma.math.unistra.fr/~maudin/newhowto.ps>. [4]: The only tool or process I’ve found which is even remotely adapted to this data model is TiddlyWiki <https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/>, which I tried, but never could get over its many quirks and primitive organizational features to make it useful even for notes to myself, let alone as an interface with others. [5]: For example, fluent readers of Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-script languages generally work by recognizing shapes of words on a page, often for several words in parallel, but teaching children or non-Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-literate adults to read this way is a famously useless affair. [6]: This also means mandatory texts for students and even mandated curricula for teachers are an atrocity which sacrifices a whole lot of adaptation capability for a modest bit of ease in detecting incompetence and bad faith. The more often a curriculum is nailed down to the time axis with tests and metrics the worse it is.

enriquto 5y ago

not about the subjects that you mention, but if you ever need to learn probability and inference, this is easily among the best books on the subject: http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html if you read the latex source, there are even some easter eggs in the comments

adolph 5y ago

There is a lot of knowledge where the world would benefit from a basic level of open ubiquity and the participation of experts who might be incented to contribute in a manner similar to Wikipedia. Here are two publishers releasing in the open: https://www.openintro.org/ https://www.openintro.org/ https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/

HDMI_Cable 5y ago

It would be nice to have this thread as a "collection" place for different open textbooks. I personally use OpenStacks, they're quite good. https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/

myself248 5y ago
This is my favorite text on electronics, open or otherwise: https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ The explanation of impedance (volume II, chapter 14) was the first one that made intuitive sense to me, after struggling with the concept for years. The whole thing is beautiful, but that chapter especially.
ravenstine 5y ago
The thing that disappoints me about Openstax is that, while they're free/libre, they don't seem to be open source anymore. They used to provide access to the raw XML (CNXML) used to generate the books, but I can't find that anywhere. It would be nice if there was something like OpenStax, maybe even a fork of it, that could be held in a Git repo and anyone could make pull requests.
- empyrical 5y ago
  It looks like they're transitioning/have transitioned to editing the books with Google Docs: https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx
miki123211 5y ago
Openstax is the best source of extremely high-quality alt descriptions I've ever found. If you need inspiration for good alt descriptions of STEM / computer science / software engineering related images, just look at how Openstax does it. I'm a screen reader user myself and I'm very impressed.
j-james 5y ago
I highly recommend Interactive Linear Algebra for learning undergrad-level linear algebra mostly in the R^N. It has a PDF version available, but the real magic is in the interactive embedded 2D and 3D visualizations. There's a couple of variations available - it was written by some professors at Georgia Tech, one of which moved to Duke and teaches off of it there - but the UBC version is my favorite, as it makes some changes in the lesson order to teach vectors before matrices. https://www.math.ubc.ca/~tbjw/ila https://www.math.ubc.ca/~tbjw/ila

bluenose69 5y ago

I had a student with limited vision in a class once, who had a reader. Luckily, I had written the course notes (basically a textbook) in latex. I consulted with the student and saw how the reader worked. All was fine, but it was slow because it said e.g. "backslash begin open brace equation close brace", so I made a perlscript to remove backslash and braces (and a few other things) and then it all worked really well. People, especially those who don't use mathematics much, think latex is hard for humans. I think exactly the reverse is true.

gjvnq 5y ago
Basic scripting is such a powerful tool, it's sad that so few people know how to use it.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Every now and again there is a push to "democratise computing for all!". I think, scripting. It is just scripting.

sodality2 5y ago

We use openstax currently in our AP Biology class. It's incredible to not have to scroll through a scanned PDF for an obscure 2010 textbook. In addition, the questions that we are assigned are completely unique so I don't believe that this will contribute to the (very pervasive) problem of cheating. I donated to Openstax as well: https://riceconnect.rice.edu/donation/support-openstax https://riceconnect.rice.edu/donation/support-openstax

533474 5y ago

When I publish my book, I will also publish the source. Knowledge is universal. Praise all the authors who release their sources.

WalterBright 5y ago
I publish all my code these days as Open Source.

pbsds 5y ago

Could a equation OCR system like [1] be combined with a screen reader? It seems to support asciimath [1]: https://mathpix.com/ocr https://mathpix.com/ocr

lightveil 5y ago
this looks interesting, and I think would be perfect for the kind of stuff I deal with. Unfortunately, the pricing looks less interesting (about $100 for a 1000 page pdf, if I'm reading it right, although possibly I could attempt to break the pdf up into pages which have the math). There was an older solution for this which costs about $200 as a whole. Stuff like this exists, and is possibly pretty reasonable monetarily, but not being in the U.S., exchange rates hit me hard. I've bookmarked this and will look into this more, though, thanks!
- lurker137 5y ago
  There is an option for 5000 snips per month for $5. If you annotate the pdf every time you convert to latex, it should be much cheaper

pfortuny 5y ago

Oh, I had never thought about this. Thanks, shall see what I can do. I never thought the latex source would make any sense to anyone but me

jimhefferon 5y ago

> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org https://www.tug.org.)

lightveil 5y ago
Oh, that's very good to hear! I'll definitely get in contact. I won't be able to, for the next two months or so, but after that I should have some free time when I can test/contribute with code/whatever else is required. (Hopefully, if this gets done, publishers that use LaTeX for typesetting might automatically offer accessible PDFs as well.)
- jimhefferon 5y ago
  Sometimes being a resource for developers, as someone who could be asked, can be valuable. Anyway, good luck with your studies!
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
Just wanted to say my thanks as well, while I have not worked with one of your books, I have a lot of respect for people that choose to release the source of textbooks they created.
- jimhefferon 5y ago
  You are welcome. Have a look at https://hefferon.net https://hefferon.net for the other books.
busyant 5y ago
> interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction Can you elaborate on what / where those projects are? It's not clear from the tug.org website. I love LaTeX and if I had a relevant skill set I'd be willing to help out. Thank you.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

This is pretty interesting. You should also consider cross-posting this request in other teaching communities, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/ https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/ https://www.reddit.com/r/matheducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/matheducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceTeachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceTeachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CSEducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CSEducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

miki123211 5y ago

Many books/websites let you view the Latex code, despite not technically being open source. If a website uses MathJax, you can change the renderer to "plain source" by opening the context menu on any math equation. "Paul's Math notes"[1] is a good example, and a really great free website for college-level math. If you're a screen reader user, the context menu may not open for reasons unknown. Try routing your mouse to the equation and simulate a right mouse click, that should do it. Moving your focus to the equation with the tab key may also be an option. Alternatively, you can just use Voice Over for MacOS, it can do it just fine.

lightveil 5y ago
Yup, I have been using this extensively. Paul's notes are something I forgot to mention-I referred to them almost daily, back when I was taking the equivalent of Calculus 1, and they're still very useful now that I'm taking differential equations. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work on OpenStax-I can't get LaTeX, all I can get is MathML, and that's not very easy to read. There's a way to navigate the math (using something called mathplayer), but it's quite inefficient as compared to LaTeX, specially as I go into higher math. The books are still very, very good, though.
- miki123211 5y ago
  Try playing with Mathjax's own accessibility settings. Not sure how well that works on Openstax, will work well if they're using Mathjax 3, badly otherwise. Alternatively play with MathPlayer's settings (in the control panel), some of the other reading modes work better in certain contexts. If you can, also try VoiceOver on the Mac, it has its own math support, which works pretty well. We seem to be in similar situations, if you want to share tips or something, my hn username at gmail dot com.

acabal 5y ago

Have you tried any epubs with MathML? If so how do they compare?

gnicholas 5y ago

FYI, if you are a student with a 'qualifying print disability' (which includes visual impairment, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities), you may be able to get free access to hundreds of thousands of books/textbooks via Bookshare. [1] They get digital versions of books from the publishers and make them accessible to people with print disabilities. This means adding image descriptions and offering various text alterations (different text sizes, special fonts and colors, etc.) to make them easier to read. They also offer math-based tools to make equations accessible. Bookshare is 100% free to any US-based student who qualifies, and various other countries have agreements with Bookshare as well. They are part of the tech-for-good nonprofit Benetech and are based out of Palo Alto. 1: http://www.bookshare.org http://www.bookshare.org.

pickdig 5y ago

jeff erickson's 'algorithms, etc.' is the textbook for our university's algo class. it's brilliant. in case, link: https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/ https://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

claudiot 5y ago

I would like to add only a link to a public organization that is working on the problem. Have a look here https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/ https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/

chrisMyzel 5y ago

I remember seeing a (trained) image-to-text approach that claimed to translate scanned math equations to latex sourcecode. Might be 3-4 weeks ago here on HN.