4 ms·

And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient

by rgmerk 4y ago

And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient than having one textbook author write a textbook used in many places. If your further suggestion is that LLMs will generate college textbooks, that seems like a gross overestimate of their current capabilities.

DoctorOW 4y ago
It's the gatekeeping that's the problem. A royalty on a textbook for the actually author is very low, maybe like $10 on a $100 textbook? Replace the editors and layout designers with AI, the printing and binding with PDF, and the campus bookstore with Shopify or the like and make the same amount of money on $15 textbooks.
- rgmerk 4y ago
  There's actually a long tradition of this kind of thing. As an undergraduate, my first-year maths "course notes" were actually a textbook in all but name, produced by the Mathematics department and sold for a very modest cost, bypassing the publishers and the campus bookshop because the markups by both were outrageous Even if you'd paid the authors $10 per copy it would have been a bargain.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absolutely overkill as many fields overlap) and it would barely be $3 billion per year: that's ~0.17% of the $1.73 trillion DOD budget for FY2023 [2]. We are keeping knowledge in chains in order for some parasitic losers to make 1 to 7 billion USD revenue per year [3]. And they are parasitic losers because (i) they prey on the authors (the authors can get even under 10% [4]), and (ii) they are capitalistically inefficient (under 10 billion USD per year is a rounding error for Apple and the likes). † although it could be a worldwide effort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2023 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... [3] https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue [4] https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book

by rgmerk 4y ago

DoctorOW 4y ago

It's the gatekeeping that's the problem. A royalty on a textbook for the actually author is very low, maybe like $10 on a $100 textbook? Replace the editors and layout designers with AI, the printing and binding with PDF, and the campus bookstore with Shopify or the like and make the same amount of money on $15 textbooks.

rgmerk 4y ago
There's actually a long tradition of this kind of thing. As an undergraduate, my first-year maths "course notes" were actually a textbook in all but name, produced by the Mathematics department and sold for a very modest cost, bypassing the publishers and the campus bookshop because the markups by both were outrageous Even if you'd paid the authors $10 per copy it would have been a bargain.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

There are about 3,000 academic fields [1], give or take. US† could easily afford to spend 1,000,000 USD per year for a new/updated textbook in each field (absolutely overkill as many fields overlap) and it would barely be $3 billion per year: that's ~0.17% of the $1.73 trillion DOD budget for FY2023 [2]. We are keeping knowledge in chains in order for some parasitic losers to make 1 to 7 billion USD revenue per year [3]. And they are parasitic losers because (i) they prey on the authors (the authors can get even under 10% [4]), and (ii) they are capitalistically inefficient (under 10 billion USD per year is a rounding error for Apple and the likes). † although it could be a worldwide effort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2023 https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... [3] https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue https://www.tckpublishing.com/top-publishers-by-revenue [4] https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book