‘Open-Source college textbooks gaining mindshare’—even if ‘free’ doesn’t always mean ‘popular’
If you’re a student, gas gouges aren’t the only worry. How about, er, textbook costs? Some U.S. students are paying as much as $1K a year—in fact, maybe even more.
"I couldn’t continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200," Slashdot quotes one author, with pointer to efforts to bribe professors to use books from such-and-such publisher.
Taking off—but challenges ahead
Open source textbooks seem to be promising if you go by a recent L.A. Times article. That said, the above author, R. Preston McAfee, a Caltech economist, has found that "free" doesn’t necessarily mean "popular" despite adoptions of his freebie at places such as Harvard.
Of course, there are pesky little questions. Who’s gonna write the damn things? Yes, you could make some money off printed versions. But it’s still iffy.
Is it possible that universities ought to consider new business models—not just to encourage individual creations but also group ones, including Wikis? Also, how about textbooks on such rather subjective matters as literary criticism? One answer might be Wikibooks with extensive customization capabilities. A wide choice of links, of course, inherently allows for customization. But maybe there could be ways for professors to cutomize online, then point to an appropriate URL.
Interesting stat from L.A. Times: "…sales of all electronic college materials—CD-ROMs, e-books and online courses— represented only $241 million of $3.5 billion in U.S. sales by major publishers in 2007, despite the fact that they typically sell at a discount, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. Free and open-source digital texts left too small a footprint to measure, experts said."
Related: Wikibooks site.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I’m glad to see open texts starting to grow in popularity. But I wonder at your priorities, David, when your first thought regarding professors writing textbooks, ‘how are they going to make money?’
Once upon a time, professors of august institutions of learning were not, primarily, concerned with making profits off their knowledge.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
“Who’s gonna write the damn things?”
Who writes open source software? Who writes software released as freeware? Who volunteers to build houses for Habitat for Humanity?
Not everybody is motivated by making money.
Who wrote all the MIT OpenCourseware class materials? MIT has about 1800 classes with lecture notes, exams, etc. freely available on the web.
The current college and school publishing model and pricing in the US is a ripoff and everyone knows it but folks feel powerless to do much about it.
My guess is that all it would take is some agreements among a few dozen universities to actually use open source texts for their classes to spur a bunch of professors and grad students to collaborate and write texts for some of these.
Of course the entrenched publishing interests will do everything they can to kill any chance of this sort of thing from actually happening.