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The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
- dyauspitr 4mo agoEverything should be free. The people writing the textbooks should spend 5 years of their life working on it for free.
- coeneedell 4mo agoThey should get paid. The press should pay them. The college pays the press. The students pay the college. The press releases information for free.
- vonneumannstan 4mo agoSo you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?
- free_bip 4mo agoOr they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.
- vonneumannstan 4mo agoThe market will reward colleges for layoffs?
- dyauspitr 4mo agoAnd what, use the historically fabulously successful flat model?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4mo agoThen students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.
- arikrahman 4mo agoThe colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.
- bradyd 4mo agoThe authors are "the press". So they somehow pay themselves?
- sixothree 4mo agoThe point of most complaints is that the author isn't the one enjoying the profit from textbooks.
- peesem 4mo agoif everything really was free then the textbook writers wouldn't need compensation since everything would be free for them too
- casey2 4mo agoIf someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.
- newer_vienna 4mo agoCopyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
- Zigurd 4mo agoCopyright term kept getting extended. Copyright was a controversial concept when it got baked into the US constitution. But the enabling laws have run off the rails, mainly due to corporate lobbying. Copyright has also been reinterpreted as a property right, when it's really a government granted limited term monopoly. Another case of the government being bought out from under the people.
- zeroonetwothree 4mo agoWhy would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
- Forgeties79 4mo agosame reason so many people contribute for free to open source projects, I imagine. Same reason tons of musicians put out music for free online as well. Both successful and amateur alike at that. I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.
- rtkwe 4mo agoThat's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.
- layer8 4mo ago
- oinoom 4mo agoI read this book cover to cover after purchasing it with money, despite it being free online, and loved it. I think it’s pretty clear that the author was in a position where they could afford to put this out there for free. But not everyone is and I think people should be compensated for their time and efforts if that’s what they want.
- chaidhat 4mo agoI tried writing a free textbook as an undergraduate. It's on quantum mechanics derived from first principles -- https://quantum.chaidhat.com https://quantum.chaidhat.com -- hope you like it!
- steele 4mo agoBuying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and booksellers have an incestuous relationship with education institutions and aggressively extract pounds of loan debt flesh from the student body.
- asdff 4mo agoNah, better to just pirate them and save your back.
- steele 4mo agoPiracy?! What do I look like, an AI CEbro pillaging intellectual property for monopolistic commercial advantage without material consequence?! For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.
- bentley 4mo agoWiley actually tried to abuse copyright law to prohibit import and sale of international textbooks. They fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and (thankfully) lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
- otras 4mo agoBig fan of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and the accompanying lectures (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/537/Spring2018/Discussion/videos.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/537/Spring2018/Disc...). Free, high quality learning materials like this are an absolute treasure, and without them, I wouldn't be where I am in my career today.
- nosioptar 4mo agoUsed that book in OS classes, absolutely loved it.
- helterskelter 4mo agoI've heard good things about openstax.
- nosioptar 4mo agoI used several of their books in school. Each of them was top notch. Hell, their math books are better than the paid books I used.
- helterskelter 4mo agoI'm glad to hear that, I just ordered their astronomy book the other day! The online/PDF material looked good but I hate diving into something unless it's on paper.
- nosioptar 4mo agoI've seen a couple printed books from them. They all seemed to be a pretty good quality print.
- EliRivers 4mo ago"We required the students to buy the book" This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.
- lgcmo 4mo agoIn our system, the university libraries filled 90% of our textbook needs. Some books were highly sought after, especially physics and calculus, which were common for all STEM majors. In those cases, we would run to the library first thing to get the books. If you missed out, someone would give you the PDF. Professors would email the reading list before the first class with their recommendations, and even tell the students which libraries had each book. Other professors would have their notes and handbooks available on the website, and have some of the copy shops sell them for the cost of printing.
- Xotic007 4mo agoOSTEP is genuinely one of the best OS resources out there. Hard to argue textbooks should be behind a paywall when the free version is this good.
- CM30 4mo agoThey should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money. And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.
- vonneumannstan 4mo agoPerhaps you fail to see how this would probably lead to textbooks costing even more and which will be directly passed to students as higher tuition?
- michaelmrose 4mo agoYou are assuming that the actual cost of a textbook on math which hasn't changed in centuries is hundreds of dollars per student per class when in actuality without the profit incentive a 100M could use the same ebook over a decade wherein the unit cost is almost too low to measured even if pay excellent folks to produce a new work.
- geor9e 4mo agoI've much respect for the Russian trend of Samizdat/Libgen/Shadow Libraries
- amdsn 4mo agoThe best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free. I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.
- RobotToaster 4mo ago>I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own Wikibooks exists to allow people to collaboratively write textbooks, so every professor doesn't have to write the entire book https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
- mna_ 4mo agoSome more free ones: Abstract Algebra by Judson - https://judsonbooks.org/abstract-algebra-theory-and-applications/ https://judsonbooks.org/abstract-algebra-theory-and-applicat... Linear Algebra by Hefferon - https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/ https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/ Real Analysis by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/ra/ https://www.jirka.org/ra/ Differential Equations by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ https://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ These should be enough to give you a first and second year undergrad level education in mathematics (minus stats&probability).
- agentifysh 4mo agoI recall a university in canada had professors w=usi g their textbooks they authored but each edition was exxactly the same but they would change the quiz/assignment or exam questions so you had to buy it on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point
- nosioptar 4mo agoIntroduction to Statistical Thinking (With R, Without Calculus) by Yakir is pretty cool. https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msby/StatThink/ https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msby/StatThink/
- Vaslo 4mo ago“Everything except what I do should be free to me.” Remember that you can make your own textbook (and accompanying materials) using your own money and time whenever you want!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- prerok 4mo agoRight. Just use the LLM to generate it for you /s
- pvnk 4mo agoCompletely agree with the sentiment of the article. Also Remzi is a fantastic teacher. Really enjoyed being in his lectures.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agoconsidering anna's archive exists, they already are?
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI remember when the university where I worked made a big show out of moving to online textbooks. It was supposed to reduce the cost, reduce the need to lug books around, save trees, any rationale you could think of was thrown into the mix. In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money. In fact printed books are still widely used.
- eszed 4mo agoWhen I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also <wink-wink nudge-nudged> about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class". I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.
- scotty79 4mo agoSoon AI should be good enough to create a correct textbook.
- tombert 4mo agoIt always annoyed me that I'm paying thousands of dollars for tuition, only to be forced to pay additional thousands for the university-specific version of a textbook. I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder. Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems. Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course. I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it. ETA: I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.
- Someone1234 4mo agoThe reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction. Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously. Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.
- jrm4 4mo agoHigher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers. You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia. Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.
- spwa4 4mo agoWhy not choose different books? For most subjects, why not old books or wikibooks?
- WalterBright 4mo agoBecause Calculus, Newtonian Mechanics, etc., has changed dramatically since 50 years ago. LOL.
- spwa4 4mo ago
- stackedinserter 4mo agoWhy can't students buy one and then make like 20 copies?
- taco_emoji 4mo agoHey, this guy taught me Operating Systems! He was a great lecturer despite his own preference for book learning :-)
- adolph 4mo agoThere are existing free textbook publishing organizations. From a satisfied consumer point of view: https://openintro.org/ https://openintro.org/ and https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/. > I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.
- anticorporate 4mo agoTextbooks being expensive has nothing to do with the textbook. The textbook as an actual object of learning is irrelevant; a textbook is just a fee added on to the cost of the class that happens to come with a physical pile of bound paper that may or may not be useful. It's unfortunately a rather regressive fee that also generates a lot of landfill waste. There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.
- WillAdams 4mo agoThere need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good. Two notable efforts: - https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... - https://www.motionmountain.net/ https://www.motionmountain.net/ as well as arguably the influential: https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ of course, in addition to crowd-sourced efforts at more traditional media: - https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ - https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/ - https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ - https://www.wikibooks.org/ https://www.wikibooks.org/ as well as an entire category of Computer Science texts/programs published as books: - http://literateprogramming.com/ http://literateprogramming.com/ - https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams?ref=nav_mybooks&shelf=literateprograms https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
- WillAdams 4mo agoThe think link should be: https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkPython/ https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkPython/
- jrm4 4mo agoI've always wondered why this case hasn't been made more obviously. Like, the entire point of a library is not "to provide a limited number of books."
- bentley 4mo agoThe university textbook market is pathological and unfair. At every turn the publishers , and the universities happily go along with it. It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find. To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out. I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition. At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around. There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book. When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated. The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise. One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.