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I am the author of a text that has been Freely available for some time now so I've read this post with interest. I'm seeing responses both here and on the Redd

I am the author of a text that has been Freely available for some time now so I've read this post with interest. I'm seeing responses both here and on the Reddit post saying things like, "If I was in charge I'd make the class professors staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit." I appreciate the sentiment, but developing a text is a great deal of work. For instance, in math developing a set of quality exercises is, in my estimation, 2/3 of the effort, so just putting beamer slides in a comb binding is nowhere near enough. At least part of the issue lies in the reward system. Lesson One of economics is that people do what they are rewarded for doing and at this point most faculty would not get professional credit for being part of an open text development effort (obviously the situation now with printed texts is that people get money, and obviously also people do things for a variety of reasons but generally ..). Since a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts, you can't be surprised that quality open texts are not thick on the ground. (I'm fortunate in that my institution has been willing to recognize my work in this, but such generosity and foresight is not common.) So it is not as simple, at least in math, as making an edict.

ivan_ah 13y ago
> staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit [...] a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts I totally agree that a meaningful text can't be created a la carte by mixing disparate sections written in different styles, and covering concepts differently. The value provided by the author is not just writing the words but choosing the order or presentation, carefully foreshadowing concepts in earlier chapters which will be presented in later chapters, and using spaced repetition in later chapters to review and solidify core ideas from the beginning. That being said, I think texts can be pretty modular if written with modularity in mind by the same (or a few) authors. For example, I was able to reuse the "intro to high school math" sections from my first book on math and physics in the followup book on linear algebra. <on topic plug>We at (http://minireference.com http://minireference.com) are building an apt-learn command for first-year textbooks. Get in touch if you want to write the Bo bullshit guide to chemistry and/or biology.</plug>

ivan_ah 13y ago

> staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit [...] a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts I totally agree that a meaningful text can't be created a la carte by mixing disparate sections written in different styles, and covering concepts differently. The value provided by the author is not just writing the words but choosing the order or presentation, carefully foreshadowing concepts in earlier chapters which will be presented in later chapters, and using spaced repetition in later chapters to review and solidify core ideas from the beginning. That being said, I think texts can be pretty modular if written with modularity in mind by the same (or a few) authors. For example, I was able to reuse the "intro to high school math" sections from my first book on math and physics in the followup book on linear algebra. <on topic plug>We at (http://minireference.com http://minireference.com) are building an apt-learn command for first-year textbooks. Get in touch if you want to write the Bo bullshit guide to chemistry and/or biology.</plug>