4 ms·
1) Great, more textbooks need to be available for everyone. 2) The EZ version is an interesting idea. Somewhat automatically generating easier/higher level ver
by kriro 13y ago
1) Great, more textbooks need to be available for everyone.
2) The EZ version is an interesting idea. Somewhat automatically generating easier/higher level versions of textbooks sounds like an interesting problem.
I think automatically changing the examples to problem domains that interest the readers (or that make less assumptions) is an interesting subproblem. Textbook mass customization if you want. I've come across quite a few textbooks that used examples that were pretty common for someone who is already familiar with the domain but for someone coming in with 0 knowledge they just seemed esoteric (think programming books that use compiler/parser examples). Simply swapping those out for something more approachable for the general audience could increase the value of some textbooks quite a bit.
- ivan_ah 13y ago> increase the value of some textbooks quite a bit I think so too! This idea has been around for a long time. Marshall McLuhan suggested the idea of a "custom book" almost 50 years ago, yet still nobody has done it: http://minireference.com/book/marshall_mcluhan_quote http://minireference.com/book/marshall_mcluhan_quote I'm currently working on software for generating custom version of my math book. There already exists an XML format called DITA which has conditional-text, but I'm started from scratch.