April 16

Professors Gone Paperless

Continuing their campaign to draw attention to the cost of textbooks, the Student Public Interest Research Groups celebrated Tuesday what they’re calling a major milestone — reaching 1,000 professors who’ve signed a statement supporting the use of free, online and open source textbooks.

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Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and “open textbooks” typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren’t commercial and they credit the author for the original material. This allows instructors to customize e-textbooks and offer them to students for free online or as low-cost printed versions.

By signing the statement, professors promise to include open textbooks in their search for course materials. “As faculty members,” the statement says, “we affirm that it is our prerogative and responsibility to select course materials that are pedagogically most appropriate for our classes. We also affirm that it is consistent with this principle to seek affordable and accessible course materials for our classes whenever possible.”

While noting that the supply of open textbooks is still “admittedly small,” the research group says the statement of solidarity is a step toward “giving commercial publishers a run for their money.”

Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, said “any faculty member or group that is willing to make that level of commitment to provide a free textbook, I applaud them.”

But he said the content creators should keep in mind the need to keep information current, offer supplemental educational tools and built-in class management systems (for grading purposes), and ensure that the cost of instruction doesn’t rise with the use of the online material.

As with much of free online content, some open textbook chapters and academic articles have caught the attention of a wide audience, and others haven’t. It takes years for a traditional textbook to move through the review and revision process, and professors undertaking these online projects know that they are always a work in progress.

Here are three professors who have gone from assigning traditional print textbooks to writing their own online versions:

An Information Scientist’s Experiment — 10 Years In

1998 was the last time that John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, used a traditional print textbook. He assigned it to his graduate-level introductory course in information systems. The book cost about $150. He also assigned supplemental reading — trade press articles, online case studies and the like. Student feedback was clear: The textbook cost was too high, and they valued the supplemental material more.

He agreed on the price complaint, calling some versions “oppressively expensive.” So Gallaugher stopped assigning the textbook and began developing syllabuses from existing online materials, including his own. He’s posted PowerPoint slides and podcasts of his lectures online ever since.

Gallaugher’s is a fast-moving field, and his area of research — market formation and the role of technology — lends itself to online experimentation. To no fault of textbook authors, by the time an edition reaches bookstores it can already be outdated.

Gallaugher said he still looks at offerings from publishers and would consider using printed textbooks again. “I’m making the decision mostly on quality and not price, but if there’s just 20 percent of the content that I want to use and I’ll end up supplementing it anyway, I can’t justify that purchase.”

Over the years, Gallaugher has amassed a lengthy collection of his online assignments and academic work. He’s working with a publisher to create a textbook out of that material. The idea is that professors can use the entire free open textbook or assign and customize individual chapters. A printed, paperback version for $25 will also be available — and Gallaugher said he’ll likely accept a small royalty.

“It’d be nice to be compensated as an author, but it’s not my primary goal that drives this,” Gallaugher said.

With the help of the publisher, Gallaugher can track who’s looking at the textbook. He said he’s not concerned about misuse of the information, because people in his field can pick out and quickly discredit bad information.

An Economist Embraces Open Source

R. Preston McAfee, a professor of business economics and management at the California Institute of Technology, said more than any other question, he gets asked whether he’s concerned that his open source content will be mangled and his name unfairly attached to shoddy work.

“My answer is generally no, I’m not worried about that — there are 50 other ways you can do the same thing to me,” said McAfee, who’s at Yahoo while on leave from Cal Tech. “I would only really object if someone puts up another version and a third party decides to quote me on it.”

Several years ago, Cal Tech asked McAfee to teach a principles of economics course. Instead of using one of the traditional textbooks, which went for more than $100, McAfee decided on creating his own version, which he calls “The Open Source Introduction to Microeconomics.”

Under his licensing agreement, McAfee controls his original copy of the online textbook but can’t necessarily track if others make changes on their own versions. He asks that users make a good faith effort to cite him on the original work, and that they don’t use the material for commercial purposes. The hope, though McAfee said it hasn’t happened yet, is for colleagues to offer competing versions that incorporate some of his chapters.

Students can read the textbook free online or buy a printed copy for $11. McAfee said he doesn’t take royalties. Of the 60,000 people who have visited his site, fewer than 10 percent downloaded the book. McAfee said he is planning to work with a publisher on an updated version of the textbook and will take royalties from printed copies, given that the publisher in that case makes a profit on sales.

McAfee said embracing open source content is most crucial for professors in fields like his, where the information isn’t rapidly changing, because it’s a way to give another option to students who often complain that publishers create new additions with few substantive changes. (Hildebrand, for his part, has pointed out that professors regularly cite the importance of the supplemental material that comes with the new editions.)

A Mathematician’s New Assignment

“The world doesn’t need another linear algebra textbook on the market — it needs a free one.” That’s been the mission statement of late for Rob Beezer, a professor of math and computer science at the University of Puget Sound.

Beezer has worked on his project, an open source math textbook, for roughly four years. He’s coded it in language that will look familiar to other mathematicians and chemists who want to edit the information.

Like the other professors, Beezer once used a printed textbook that cost more than $100. And like the other online alternatives, Beezer’s is free for students and professors to use. He is planning on releasing a new edition this summer, a soft-bound book for $24.50. (Beezer gets $5 in royalties from each copy.)

He is asking students to bring $25 on the first day of class to cover the costs of printing and binding copies of the book. Beezer said he encourages students to have the printed version because it’s helpful to write in the margins.

While Beezer said he doesn’t expect to get rich from the sales of his printed version, he hopes to spread his work — two courses outside his university just started using the book. And he’d like to demonstrate that professors who provide free content can eventually make it financially worth their while.

“Once people get over the ‘you get what you pay for’ syndrome, they’ll try this out and see the benefits,” he said.

— Elia Powers

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Comments

We Need a Grant Program for Open Source Textbooks

What we need now is a competitive grant program (at the federal, state, and campus levels) to pay faculty to develop high-quality textbooks in many fields, and make sure faculty get rewarded for it in the tenure process. This isn’t just a benefit to students: having free online textbooks is also one of the best and cheapest foreign aid programs possible.

John K. Wilson, collegefreedom.org, at 8:05 am EDT on April 16, 2008

Psychology

Interesting story. I have tried a comparable online text for my introduction to psychology course. www.intropsych.com offers content comparable to the standard texts, and is available to students at no cost online.

I wonder what other disciplines and courses have online texts? Perhaps there is a directory or other listing that I have not yet happened upon....

Michael Nielsen, at 8:15 am EDT on April 16, 2008

Global Text Project

A global initiative in this arena is underway under the co-leadership of Professor Richard T. Watson at the University of Georgia. Rick, a professor of Management Information Systems, exemplifies a broad and compassionate vision. Don McCubbrey of the Univ. Denver is the other project co-leader. There is a link about related initiatives on the Global Text Project website: http://globaltext.org/

Joe, at 8:55 am EDT on April 16, 2008

“green” articles

I want to thank you for the articles related to the environment and campus greening initiatives. These are helpful and insightful. Please continue!-Scot

Dr. Scot Duncan, Birmingham-Southern College, at 9:00 am EDT on April 16, 2008

Free? Like Open Source Software?

In reality nothing is free. There are costs, but they shift. One commenter suggested that we need a Grant program to pay professors to write “free” books. This just shifts how it is payed for.

If the money comes from the “Government” is free? If you are not sure, then think about this.

Making course material available online for free or for cheap to the student is a great way to compete with traditional book publishing. It is a Green way to go as well. Think of all the trees it would save.

However, in the long run, the market will adjust to include this as an option at a cheaper cost. However, we need quality content and the way to have that created is to have incentives to produce.

Online distribution speeds the time to market, allows for real time updated content, alternate ways to view and access the content, allows for a wider variety of content, and I am sure more benefits could be enumerated.

It would be awesome if instructional books were made available in both traditional book form and online content. This would allow instructors and students to chose the media that works best for a particular subject and forum.

Bret Hansen, Free? Like Open Source Software?, at 11:20 am EDT on April 16, 2008

Ultimate Goal — Kindle?

What I envision as the future of this kind of digital course material is that all of a student’s textbooks and supplementary materials would be available for download to a Kindle or similar reader. Imagine having all of one’s books, articles, peer papers, etc with you all all times, searchable, and weighing 2 lbs.

Better yet, imagine that scenario for scholars doing research.

Dereck Daschke, Chair, Dept. of Philosophy & Religion at Truman State University, at 11:55 am EDT on April 16, 2008

Devil’s advocate

I agree in theory with the idea that making textooks more affordable, and even free, would be helpful to all students—it would have helped me tremendously when I was a student paying my own way through college. However, something interesting stuck out at me at the end of the article about the Math Professor at University of Puget Sound. I notice that he did encourage the students to also purchase the printed book (from him) and he receives a royalty (25%—higher than most publishers pay—standard runs 10% to 15%) from each printed copy. So once again we find that people actually do want to be compensated for their work and efforts...

I’m surprised that he is allowed to 1) collect ANY money from students—most WA state university auditors do not allow professors to handle money from students, and 2) that he can receive royalties for a book that he recommends that students in his class purchase. It is a situation that is ripe with conflict of interest...unless he has gone through peer review and the royalties go somewhere besides his bank account.

Michelle, at 1:05 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

An Open Kindle?

Devices like the Kindle or Sony’s eBook Reader have a great potential for how students could use open educational resources. However, they are designed to have changeable font sizes, which results in “reflowing” the text to fit the display size.

This presents a number of extra challenges for technical and scientific material. I have not found a feasible way to convert my open-source mathematics textbook into a format that the Kindle can render, and Sony is one of the most proprietary hardware vendors ever.

If these hardware platforms were also more open (less proprietary), then there would be a greater likelihood these obstacles could be removed by those motivated to seek a solution.

Robert Beezer, Professor of Mathematics at University of Puget Sound, at 1:25 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

Other advantages of on-line materials

Cost is just one factor to switch to online textbooks and electronic materials. One is just to stop teachers from using the textbook to ask students “What are the five most important factors of marketing". This is memorized material that the author chose as the five major factors. With an abundance of electronic materials and discussions the question could be “From class discussions and your readings, what would you classify the 5 most important factors of marketing".

In my book Managing Technology in Our Schools, there is a large discussion on why electronic curriculum will quickly surpass paper textbooks used as curriculum. (Sorry not a commercial, just a suggested reading.)

Betsy Price, Faculty Associate at UTB, at 2:25 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

Open Source History?

I’m not aware of a real open source textbook in World History: anyone know some? The textbook cost problem is just as bad there as it is in science. There are one or two that I know of in Asian history but nothing that I’d be happy using.

Once, I tried using the Encyclopedia Britannica Online as a course text: students hated it, didn’t understand or didn’t use it. Things have changed a bit since then, perhaps, but different populations will deal with these things differently.

Jonathan Dresner, at 3:45 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

Some Philosophy Texts Online

Since 2000 I have developed six online textbooks in Philosophy all open access (no toll) at :http://www.ppecorino.com/BOOKS.html

They are aprpeciated by students who can hit print for the chapters and pages they wish to hold in their hands and markup. I hear from people who use them located around the world and occassionally from faculty who use them or portions of them in their classes.

Philip Pecorino, Professor at Queensborough Community College, at 3:45 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

As the author of an online textbook that’s been available for about five years, I’d say that the practice of writing free textbooks is barely sustainable. First and foremost is the lack of recognition in the tenure and promotion process for probationary faculty. Second is the amount of time required to write, edit, illustrate, and update such a book. I could go on and on ...... Give some of these authors a few more years and I wonder how many of their books will still be timely and up-to-date, and constantly improved without release time or compensation of some sort (as with my experience).

Michael Ritter, at 3:45 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

Royalties

Michelle suggests that I have collected royalties from my own students for my open-source mathematics textbook. Most semesters I teach from the latest version to more easily incorporate corrections and student suggestions, and I organize a group purchase from Kinko’s for a loose-leaf copy, at about $26 per student. This is done at Kinko’s heavily discounted cost for a large order (25,000 pages at about half-price) and I do not net any money in the process. As a private university, I don’t know of any rules preventing me doing the students the favor of organizing this group purchase and keeping their textbook affordable.

The one semester (Spring 2007) when the print-on-demand version was the most current, I advertised a rebate of the $5 royalty to any student who presented me with their purchased copy for verification. About half took me up on the offer.

I, of course, want to teach out of the book I have written. Anything less would be a disservice to my students. And I do intend to demonstrate that an author can be “compensated for their work and efforts” but through donations and affordable physical copies. No conflict of interest here — after all it is my student’s tuition that has in large part allowed me to devote much of my professional activities to writing the book. Is the situation all that much different with “traditional” textbooks, royalties, university support and student purchases?

Robert Beezer, Professor at University of Puget Sound, at 5:15 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

open source and quality

I applaud the idealism and sympathy for students behind these open source textbook efforts. And I have no doubt that many people have given generously of their time and expertise for this kind of work. But I still think well-prepared commercial textbooks are a good deal for many situations.

(Disclaimer: I have published a textbook through a reputable international publisher. Before you say “sellout,” let me tell you that if I’m lucky, I figure I’ll make a little more than a dollar an hour for my labor before used book sales kill my royalties. Yes, it’s more than I’d have made through open source development, but it’s not exactly getting rich off of students. And by the way, when I use the book in my own classroom, I donate the royalties to a scholarship fund.)

The strengths of open source projects are their sheer exuberance, often supported by the enthusiasm of a handful of visionary laborers. Sometimes this creates really promising stuff. The downside is that often the whole project collapses, either with a whimper or a bang: visionaries get bored or go broke, infighting erupts, grants run out, and so on. The resulting product is often buggy, incomplete, and user-hostile, useful only to the cognoscenti who spend a lot of time tinkering with it to make it work.

While commercial products certainly aren’t perfect, they do at least have an added incentive for quality: the market. Like it or not, capitalism pushes producers to develop a well-finished product or risk losing their labor and money. A bad product simply doesn’t sell, and thereby dies its own well-deserved death.

For commercial textbooks, for example, publishers invest a lot of time and resources to create a quality product. Authors, editors, developmental editors, expert reviewers, book designers, permissions editors, copy-editors, and a host of other good people work together to create the best book they reasonably can. What’s so immoral about that?

I think the open source model will work for some pedagogical materials – even textbooks, though I think case studies, problem sets, exercises, scenarios, and simulations seem like better candidates. (Does anyone use the term “learning objects” anymore?) Also, I’d think open source would be a great model for higher level or graduate courses, where the market often isn’t big enough for a commercial publisher to make a profit. It would make a lot of sense for teachers of those courses to band together to share materials.

But for many other situations, a well-produced commercial textbook can be a boon, and well worth the money. For example, one audience often served by a textbook is the inexperienced or uninformed teacher. We’ve all been there at one point or another: either we were just young and didn’t yet have a clear idea of how to translate our school learning into pedagogical materials, or we were asked in a pinch to teach something outside of our field. Or perhaps the course is a gen ed requirement taught mostly by inexperienced grad students.

For situations like these, commercial textbooks work very well. At their best, commercial textbooks present a coherent, well-designed, thoroughly vetted and tested set of materials that can guide inexperienced teachers or relieve the burden of development from experienced teachers.

We should also keep in mind that rising textbook costs are less the fault of commercial publishers than of increasingly sophisticated textbook resellers – sometimes our own colleagues. Within a week of the release of my book to potential adopters, there were three copies on ebay, obviously put there by faculty selling their exam copies (there couldn’t have been used copies available, since it came out mid-semester). This practice not only hurts authors and publishers, but the students who ultimately pay the cost in increased textbook prices.

Besides, this is all relatively small potatoes compared to the real causes of higher costs for education: burgeoning health care costs, exploding pay for upper management and coaches, and our penchant for turning our campuses into 4-star health resorts, complete with spas, coffee bars, swimming pools, and climbing walls.

Miles, at 9:00 pm EDT on April 16, 2008

Responding to One and All

Despite the fact that there are some differences amongst the responders to this article, I cannot say I significantly disagree with anyone. Bret Hansen is correct that this sort of publication is not free, but I think, in general, it is a fairly good redistribution of resources.

I happen to be one of those who has applied for a federal grant to spend three years writing an on-line “text” (although I don’t think my project is even remotely close to being a text in the usual sense). If the grant is awarded (1) I will make a piddling salary for three years, (2) my already very wealthy university will get a disproportionate cut as “overhead,” (3) there will be a redistribution of resources in support of my “product” from taxpayers who pay taxes because their government has identified socially desirable outcomes to which they should contribute, while, most important, (4) students – who will be taxpayers themselves in the not too distant future – will receive “free” textbook materials at precisely the time when “free” matters to them the most.

But, please allow me to tell you that has no bearing at all on my decision to undertake this project if it is funded ... and maybe even undertake it if it is not funded at all. I will describe my incentive from the perspective of a mathematician ... and, in that light, I think Professor Beezer’s on-line linear algebra text is not bad at all for his audience. Interestingly enough, I have already written an on-line monograph in matrix algebra for my social science students, one that I will probably make available to anyone who would benefit from using it as a learning resource and (take note Professor Hansen) with no cost to anyone but myself (very selfless of me, huh?).

Here is why I hope my grant request is awarded. I will use Discipline X as an example, but you should imagine I am talking about something like introductory calculus or introductory statistics. In Discipline X, there are well over 100 introductory texts, and to quote a famous politician,” there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the lot of them.” That is because of the tyranny of the publishing companies whose response to taking a risk with a textbook by an author who thinks outside the proverbial box is “Oh, we couldn’t even consider that. We are committed to new texts that will sell by virtue of (1) dumbing down to the least common denominator, (2) doing nothing different from the other 100+ books on the market (remember, texts are written for the professors who adopt them, not for the students who learn from them), (3) we must fit the text very neatly into either a one-semester or a two-semester format, and (4) we try to sell our texts by emphasizing irrelevant graphics and lots of color.” If you are clever, innovative, bright, pedagogically astute, intellectually honest, etc. you can forget about Doubleday; Elsevier; Harper & Row; Houghton Mifflin; Alfred A. Knopf; Little, Brown and Company; Macmillan; McGraw Hill; W. W. Norton & Company; Prentice Hall; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Random House; Routledge Kegan Paul; Charles Scribner’s Sons; Simon and Schuster; Springer Verlag; W.W. Norton & Company; and John Wiley & Sons. You should not be writing for faculty and you should certainly not be writing for those risk-averse publishers. Write for students ... take your genius and your knowledge of pedagogy on line!

Here’s why I hope a federal agency will support my endeavor ...

1. My work will be mathematically, statistically, and logically accurate.

2. My instructional strategy will rely, to a very large degree, on visual aids, graphical displays, and “real-world” examples, making it both intuitive and relevant.

3. Without compromising the importance of theory, there will be much emphasis on using the theory to develop and illustrate very powerful data analytic and probability modeling tools.

4. Data analyses will be facilitated by using R, an open-source statistical analysis system.

5. The flexibility of the presentation format will (1) facilitate inclusion of many more topics and (2) enable coverage of individual topics in much greater depth than an author could implement in an introductory Discipline X textbook or a teacher could address in a one-semester course.

6. Each topic in a given module will be linked to related topics in other modules. Many terms, concepts, visual aids, and data analytic tools will be linked to external sources. All relevant vocabulary will be linked to a glossary of terms relevant to Discipline X.

Damn, I gave it away, didn’t I? Oh, by the way, as someone who has taught for almost fifty years at some of the most “highly regarded” universities in the country, I have never had tenure and I have never taught as an adjunct. I could care less how this activity contributes to promotion and tenure.

Frizbane Manley, at 5:05 am EDT on April 17, 2008

A tip on a free niche textbook

This is only good for a particular type of course, but the Melles-Griot optics catalog actually has a really good optics guide that could almost serve as a textbook. I know one person who actually used it as a textbook, and I’m thinking of using it as a supplement. Of course, giving out commercial materials in class is something that needs to be done with caution, but one advantage is that the students then have in front of them data on hundreds of actual devices that they can analyze for their homework, rather than theoretical curves and selected excerpts of data.

Probably not transferable to most situations, but if you’re teaching optics, take a look at it.

Alex, Asst. Prof at Cal Poly Pomona, at 11:50 am EDT on April 17, 2008

Not suggesting

I would like to clarify that 1) I was not “suggesting” that Rob Beezer is “collecting royalties"...I was going by the information contained in the article as quoted below:

“Beezer’s is free for students and professors to use. He is planning on releasing a new edition this summer, a soft-bound book for $24.50. (Beezer gets $5 in royalties from each copy.)

He is asking students to bring $25 on the first day of class to cover the costs of printing and binding copies of the book.”

and 2) my comments were not intended to impugn Professor Beezer’s motives in any way. More to the point, it is a comment on the conflict we all face at yes, wanting to provide materials to students and wishing we could do it for free, but running up against the same brick wall over and over—nothing is free. In order for someone to sit down and write a textbook, somewhere along the line we have to find a way to be compensated unless we find a way to not eat or not pay the rent. From the most altruistic individual to the publishers. Kinko’s makes a profit...and must in order to survive. I do see open sourcing as a way to try and control costs, and we absolutely MUST find a way to get the cost under control...but we also have to recognize that nothing is for free—even when we really do want it to be.

Part of the problem we face in course materials is that we are dealing with a generation that really, really likes and to a certain extent, NEEDS bells and whistles to hold their attention. Bells and whistles add to cost. Also, working in a college bookstore, I am amazed daily at the people who will almost faint at the $100 dollar price on a text book—something that involved at least ten different people to produce—yet will instantly and gleefully pay $60 for a sweatshirt that took maybe one or two people and probably about $3 to produce. Not to mention the ipods, video games, etc.

Finding a balance. I believe in open sourcing because it will hopefully provide some of that balance...but I also know, as an author myself, that I can’t work for free, no matter how much I care about students—and those students are hoping their college education enables them to work for decent wages as well.

I don’t believe that all publishers are evil, greedy moneychangers...but I do think they miss the boat when they outprice themselves. I also question the practice that many of them have of charging American students $100 dollars for the same books they sell in other countries for half or less. In this global information age, students see this and blame the bookstores.

Michelle, at 11:50 am EDT on April 17, 2008

A few comments:

Publishers — while publishers do provide some value, and it does take a team to make a textbook, they do not get a free pass on their pricing methods. Just the scam that they shift page numbers to create a new version to make students buy new books shows that they will stoop to any level to exploit the system without adding any value. I have a friend who works in Private Equity and he just bought a textbook publisher. I asked why, and he said because “we have complete power to control over pricing and can exploit it".

On Quality: Community based models can create the highest levels of quality. There have been independent studies comparing science articles on Wikipedia to science articles in encyclopedia Britannica, and the accuracy was completely equal, with Wikipedia having the huge advantage that any innacuracies could be corrected in minutes for free, where Britannica (or textbooks) require full reprints and repurchases for $100s. The community based publishing models still need to evolve, but they are very strong already.

The claim that textbooks are a small fraction of the cost of education is completely wrong. People forget that a VAST majority of higher ed students in the US are in community colleges (California alone has 1.5 million students in the CC system). Tuition/year at CCs is often around $500, whereas textbooks for a year average over $1200. And these students tend to be the most under served and most sensitive to price. In addition, developing countries around the world site textbook cost as one of the top barriers to access to education. It’s only the elite and private institutions that textbooks are a small percentage of cost, and that is a tiny fraction of higher ed students.

Just as an anecdote, I completed my Masters in Education last year at a top 5 University, and the professors didn’t make us buy a single textbook all year. It was all excerpts, bulkpacks, pdfs and handouts. Profs are avoiding textbooks now and publishers are shooting themselves in the foot.

Here is an interesting platform people are using to publish open textbooks. www.cnx.org

Vic, at 2:40 pm EDT on April 17, 2008

Publishers — Vic, you are naïve to believe that commercial publishers would invest the money in a “new edition” on average every 2 years, with a substantial (upwards of $1.5K) investment, in producing a new edition and only change the page numbers. If that’s the case, there are plenty of “used” copies of “out dated” editions for instructors and students to use, and publishers would be out of business. (and your friend in Private Equity would have made a poor decision).

As it stands 95% percent of instructors use textbook and supplemental materials (either print or eBook) to some degree. There still a demand for current content with relevant examples, that is pedagogically sound, linked to course objectives and learning outcomes, and solid support materials including new testbank questions, lecture outlines, video programs and online grading programs.

This is an enormous undertaking that requires a large investment. This is precisely why developers of “open source” content are requesting grants. I do commend the efforts of anyone trying to produce an “open source” teaching and learning package. It will be interesting to see if such efforts are scalable or sustainable, as content changes so rapidly.

Cost – The reason you have seen such an increase in the price of commercial textbooks not because of some “SCAM” it’s is because of the accessibility of “used books” on an international scale. Publishers and authors only get paid 1 time per/8-10 uses of their materials; thus the first student that purchases the materials “new” subsidizes the other students. Also let’s not forget that bookstores are a “profit center” for the college or university. The average mark-up on textbooks is 35% percent and the institution benefits.

A few considerations for driving costs down for students are offering digital and custom content by topic or chapter level via ecommerce as an alternative, or for institutions to think about different business models subscribing to aggregated databases, licensing content to deliver within course management systems, or to sign exclusive vendor agreements as the “for profit” institutions often do.

Liz, at 1:15 pm EDT on April 23, 2008

Hi Liz, Naive? I think that you may be a bit naive. I have experienced this first hand, where new versions came out a year later that had no significant changes, but they shifted enough numbering (pages, problem sets..etc) that I had to buy the new version to stay in sync with the class. Publishers have even admitted this practice publicly:

“In an opinion editorial published in the New York Times, Erwin V. Cohen, a former publishing industry executive for the Academic Press wrote, “Publishers release new editions of successful textbooks every few years — not to improve content, although that may be a byproduct — but to discourage the sales of used books by making them seem obsolete.”

“Many of them admit that one of their main reasons for publishing new editions is to counteract losses to the used book market,” said Dr. Dennin.

Here is plenty of data showing that I’m not naive...I work with former publishers that openly admit to these practices.

read this:http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/newsroom.asp?id2=16814

Vic, at 5:15 am EDT on April 24, 2008

“And I do intend to demonstrate that an author can be “compensated for their work and efforts” but through donations and affordable physical copies.”

Professor Beezer, would you apply that model to your teaching job? Do you think that you can and should be fairly compensated for your prep time and lectures via student donations? That would be a nice experiment, actually. Forego your salary for a year (or donate it to the Open Textbook Project) and put a tip cup in front of the lecturn, like at Starbucks. Report your results here. :)

As for “affordability of physical copies,” I suspect that the same people complaining now about $100 publisher copies will eventually complain about $25 Lulu copies.

Linda, at 2:05 pm EDT on July 12, 2008

“No conflict of interest here — after all it is my student’s tuition that has in large part allowed me to devote much of my professional activities to writing the book.”

I agree that it’s your students’ tuition that allows you so much free time to write free books. The Wall Street Journal had an article awhile back called, “College Professors: The New Leisure Class.” It addressed the fact that full-time professors do not work a 40 hr/work week like full-time everyone else (more like a 24 hr work week), plus there are huge amounts of time off.

Don’t you think that if we all stepped up to work a 40 hr work week, it would enable our employers to hire less adjunct, hence lowering tuition -a education cost *far* greater than textbooks?

Linda, at 7:30 pm EDT on July 12, 2008

Paperless education

Paperless education has already opened unprecedented opportunities for education world-wide, and will continue to do so. The youth is particularly receptive to learning and we acquire most of our lifelong skills and habits at these early stages of life. The education system is the first contact with document generation and reading, and exposure to paperless practices at an early stage can very effectively lead to the adoption of paperlessness for life. Furthermore, a paperless way of reading, researching and completing assignments would provide all the flexibilities mentioned my book “Paperless Joy” to both students and teachers. See: http://www.paperlessjoy.com

George Dimopoulos, Dr., at 6:20 am EDT on August 20, 2008

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