10 ms·

Would somebody please disrupt the textbook publishing industry? http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susanna-Epp/dp/0495391328/ http://www.a

• gohrt 12y ago
  There are plenty of less expensive books available for professors who care.
  • johan_larson 12y ago
    Yes, the problem is that the one picking the book (the professor) isn't the one paying for it (the student). Some useful discussion here, including indications that cheaper options exist: http://suburbdad.blogspot.ca/2014/08/oer-erps-and-idea.html http://suburbdad.blogspot.ca/2014/08/oer-erps-and-idea.html Maybe what's required is a company that a) publishes cheap (probably older) textbooks, and b) rouses student organizations to push for their adoption. Part b) is by far the harder one, and probably doesn't have a technical solution. It's a marketing/consciousness-raising thing.
• jey 12y ago
  This only works because there's a captive audience, and the publisher knows that they can get away with charging anything since the students feel they have no other choice but to buy a copy. Far more specialized textbooks with far smaller audiences are routinely available for much cheaper (e.g. http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG http://amzn.to/1ByBDLG). The right place to target reform would be professors. They should take a stand to write and use only open textbooks that can be freely downloaded and distributed. This is already common at the research level, but it doesn't seem as common for intro textbooks.
  • personlurking 12y ago
    Do you or does anyone know if there's any kind of existing market for pirated textbooks? I'm not a student but if music and films are pirated in large doses, it seems textbooks geared towards the same demographic would be popular.
    • evincarofautumn 12y ago
      Yes, textbook piracy is commonplace. When I was a student, I always pirated the textbooks that I could, using the student file sharing service at my university or the Pirate Bay. Eating food and saving my parents’ money were more important to me than having dead-tree copies of textbooks that I would use for ten weeks then never read again.
• rcarrigan87 12y ago
  The bigger question may be why do we even still have "textbooks," at least in their traditional form? Are textbooks the optimal way to learn given all the technology we have today? I'm sure there are quite a few start-ups working on this problem.
  • namenotrequired 12y ago
    Khan Academy comes to mind.
    • theoutlander 12y ago
      For software related jobs, pretty soon I'm going to start accepting candidates with substantial coursera credits. Furthermore, we'll be looking at courses in related fields.... Epidemiological Modeling in our case. Students who have successfully completed those core courses and have gained actual knowledge will easily come through in the interviews.
  • afontaine 12y ago
    That's the main issue, textbooks are not the ideal form of learning for some subjects. Studies have shown that text is not the ideal format for novices to learn a subject for the first time. I'm a co-founder at https://www.clutchprep.com https://www.clutchprep.com and that's what we're tackling. Students go to 300+ student classrooms, don't learn much and then have to rely on a $250 textbook to teach themselves (doesn't work well for most). It's a broken system. Edit: fixed the link
  • bcohen5055 12y ago
    I'd have to say there is a good use case for textbooks in engineering. Go into any mechanical engineer or chemical engineers cubical and you will find that they all have many of their college textbooks. Textbook chapters are a way better organized than websites when you are looking up values in tables, applying them to equations, and adapting example problems.
    • prawn 12y ago
• christiangenco 12y ago
  I have a side project I started in college for this: http://textbooksplease.com http://textbooksplease.com The big problem I'm facing right now is how to subvert universities requiring super specific and customized versions of their textbooks. I think the solution is a crowdsourced list of textbook alternatives (ie: "your university says you need Biology Harvard Custom Edition, but that book is the same as Biology minus chapters 6 and 11. You can get the generic edition for $11"). That's really just a bandaid, though. A real solution would look something like https://www.boundless.com/ https://www.boundless.com/ or Khan Academy.
• wellboy 12y ago
  Chegg is doing this big time and they are already IPOd.
• karatekidd32v 12y ago
  Check out boundless (boundless.com). They offer alternatives to the typical intro college textbooks for $20 each by leveraging open educational resources (OERs).
• superuser2 12y ago
  It doesn't matter that a student can't afford their books on $7/hour. No one seriously expects a kid to make even a dent in the cost of his education anymore, because relative to cost of attendance (except at community colleges) kids in general just don't have the earning power. Cost of attendance at my state flagship is $24,000. Full time at minimum wage is $15,080. Any education worth that kind of money is hard enough that you physically can't work full time while doing it. Student labor is pretty miniscule as a source of funding. In other words, $264.39 is not actually 37 hours at McDonalds. It's a rounding error on a parent's 6-figure contribution over 4 years. Or a rounding error in your monthly loan payment when you're making $50k instead of $8k. Or it's coming out of interest on the school's endowment if the school is good enough and your family poor enough. Or it's coming from whoever funds your scholarship if you are one of the handful of people smart enough to get a merit-based full ride. Etc. (No, your experience of putting yourself through a state flagship in the 80s is not relevant. Minimum wage is roughly what it was; tuition is decidedly not.) I believe the textbook publishing industry could adapt (or be disrupted) to be more cost-efficient, but you would first have to vastly reconfigure the higher education system such that it's reasonable for students to pay their own way. Then you'd actually have incentives to price things for students.
  • Ologn 12y ago
    I take classes at a decently ranked public school, and many of the students are not having tuition paid by scholarship or endowment. Their parents are certainly not paying the full ride - they may contribute a little, if anything. Students can't always get all the loans they would need, and it doesn't make financial sense to pile too much of that on. So plenty of people are paying out of their salaries. I do this and many of the people I speak with do this. You talk about full-time classes and a full-time job. Actually some of my classmates are raising children or that sort of thing as well. But beyond that, you're correct that it is hard to take a hard STEM major full-time and also work full-time. It would be almost impossible to maintain a 4.0 or 3.9 or whatnot. The solution is obvious, don't take a full course load - take three classes a semester, or perhaps two, or perhaps one. It takes longer, but what is the alternative for those who can't afford full-time study? If some 18 year old can't really afford full-time study...then don't do full-time study. Why make your parents shell out thousands they can't afford, as well as burdening yourself with enormous loans, for something you may very well not complete in four years. Some kids graduate and are not working - a lot nowadays. On this public school commuter campus, the smarter half of the CS major seniors I know have never heard of software version control, have no idea what git, Perforce, cvs etc. is. Most of our professors are good too - most of them understand their topics, and some are even good at explaining it. A dedicated person can get a lot out of the education, and then perhaps go get a Masters at a more prestigious school afterward if they want. If people can't afford fulltime, don't go fulltime. Maybe the government should help more, maybe not, but if someone can't pay fulltime they should go parttime.
• Nicholas_C 12y ago
  Is there no crowd sourced, open sourced textbook non-profit organization? Sort of like Wikipedia/Wikimedia but with textbooks. Ideally there would be a Wiki-like website with people constantly editing and revising and arguing over texts/chapters/paragraphs. A cursory Google search yields the site https://openstaxcollege.org/ https://openstaxcollege.org/, which appears to be supported by Rice University. This has open sourced texts, but not crowd sourced. As a recent graduate I remember shelling out thousands of dollars during my undergrad years to pay for textbooks. It was always a crapshoot because you never knew if the professor would not use the textbook at all or would heavily rely on it and assign reading/problems from the book. There are definitely ways around purchasing expensive textbooks, but most are illegal, and none are convenient or guaranteed.
  • guynamedloren 12y ago
    I'm trying to do this with Penflip (https://www.penflip.com https://www.penflip.com). It's like GitHub, but for writing. Just like GitHub, there are public and private projects. Anybody can contribute to a public project by submitting a pull request. A big hurdle is that the concept of 'open source' is a bit foreign outside tech, but I think there is some potential. Here's an open source Java book on Penflip: https://www.penflip.com/lynnlangit/tkp-lesson-plans https://www.penflip.com/lynnlangit/tkp-lesson-plans
  • webmaven 12y ago
    Yes, several: http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/ http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/ http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/ http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/ http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/ http://www.opensourcetext.org/ http://www.opensourcetext.org/ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page http://creativecommons.org/tag/open-textbooks http://creativecommons.org/tag/open-textbooks
  • ethanhunt_ 12y ago
    A wikipedia for textbooks? There's exactly that, though I can't comment on the quality. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Calculus/Limits/An_Introduction_to_Limits http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Calculus/Limits/An_Introduction...
• Cyranix 12y ago
  It seems to me that the most powerful opportunity here would be not only to disrupt textbooks but also academic journals; in the process of tackling both areas as a unified problem of knowledge distribution, one might shorten the distance between the latest research and the established curriculum, as well as opening an avenue for better modes of teaching (as per the point made by `rcarrigan87).
  • untilHellbanned 12y ago
    We're working on disrupting academic journals at Onarbor, https://onarbor.com https://onarbor.com
  • ac29 12y ago
    I really like what PeerJ is doing in that space: https://peerj.com/ https://peerj.com/ Really takes open access (which is great, but still expensive) to the next level. Very inexpensive publishing, and free preprints.
• arjie 12y ago
  Students are just pirating the books. If money issues are hindering your education, then it's easy to justify that. Listen, Uber is an example: Not playing by the rules makes it easier to win and when you do a few will complain about your lack of ethics but only a tiny fraction will make that count against you. JustFab? You may be upset about dark patterns but people love them. Apple, Google, et. al. intentionally breaking the law? No one cares, people still want to work for them. Intel's illegal anti-competition activities? Microsoft's? People still love them. No one cares about the guy who worked his ass off so he could afford a book, if that work cut into the time needed to study, leaving him less educated. People celebrate the guy who, having pirated books, was able to concentrate on learning and has the free time to become better at many other things.
• zo1 12y ago
  One thing that they did at my university about 5 years ago to disrupt just this. A group of ex-students (I think) setup a container outside the main entrance, across the street. There they bought old textbooks from students that just finished a subject, and then sold it back to the students using it the following year. Obviously the books changed slightly. But they kept change lists, so you always knew if you had the latest info or not. Sometimes, even the lecturers did this. E.g. "If you have ed4, it's on page 400-403, otherwise it's page 389-392 on the latest edition, etc".
• yumraj 12y ago
  I'm currently looking at textbook industry and believe it's a part technology and part business model solution where we can draw from trends in some other industries. We have some ideas but it's a work in progress. If anyone is interesting in this domain and would like to chat, please ping me. I'm in SF Bay Area, email is in my HN profile.
• TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Screw the unversity, at this level people stop buying books anyway; if the book is too expensive, it's better to get a bootleg PDF or just borrow one from a library and xerox it for the whole year. No one cares, you don't need a textbook on lectures anyway. But please oh please disrupt textbooks for schools. Parents are forced to buy new books every year because of social pressure. After all, you wouldn't want your kid to be known in class as "the one with parents too poor to even buy a textbook" and bullied for it. Not that adults would care about someone having a copied book - but the kids do. Recognition and respect of their classmates is of paramount importance to every kid in the school; publishers know this and they can charge whatever they like, and parents have to pay.