Open Source Textbooks
A reader asks:
I know you are doing a lot of request threads so I wondered if you could possibly do one about the outrageous price of textbooks. I thought of this issue yesterday when I listened to a segment on weekend All Things Considered where they assembled a group of high school juniors and seniors. Many of them were obviously worried about how they were going to pay for school and the price of text books seemed to be a real concern since many scholarships cover only tuition rather than cost of living (text books, room and board, etc.).
High prices for textbooks seems endemic to the textbook concept, since it’s hard to see how you could ever establish a market with vigorous price-based competition for these things. Fortunately, I think there’s a pretty promising alternative in the form of open source textbooks. The idea would be to create textbooks that could be distributed at something close to marginal cost of production and distribution of the books—possibly including free or super-cheap online or ebook versions.
Of course in principle all sorts of media could be distributed that way. Fiction books, commercial non-fiction, music, movies, etc. But textbooks seems like an unusually promising case. Not just because textbooks have an unusually large extra monopoly cost, but because they’re not really a consumer product. Textbooks are overwhelmingly either being purchased by government agencies or non-profits, or else the purchasers are being ordered to buy them by government agencies or non-profits. Under the circumstances, what would make the most sense would be for state departments of education, universities, and interested private foundations to simply pay to commission initial work on open source textbooks and/or encourage staff to participate in improving them.
There are a lot of logistical hurdles and coordination problems involved in getting something like this off the ground in a big way, but the benefits would be large. Indeed, more generally it would serve the public interest to have better and more widespread open source stuff in general—including in the most famous case of software—and looking for ways at the margin to use public funds to support open source activities rather than closed source ones would be very good policy.
71 Responses to “Open Source Textbooks”
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January 12th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Nobody wants to produce good-quality textbook content for free, because writing instructional materials doesn’t get you tenured or promoted–it’s an on-the-side activity, one for which you expect to be paid. Of course, *some* people will do it for free, but I don’t know if we want a system built upon those exceptions, who won’t necessarily be the most qualified.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I’ve created a new concept called Open Source Matthew Yglesias.
From now on, all posts here shall be open source and subject to modification to make them more correct.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:30 am
The way colleges abuse the textbook market is fairly odious. At my school, I was blocked for arranging a textbook market on school grounds to facilitate the exchange of used books. You could return them to the bookstore, of course, but $20 back on a $140 book that would be turned around and resold at $115 the next semester didn’t seem quite fair. The school was not a fan of the fact that myself and a few others figured out that two hours of data entry in microsoft excel pretty much let us cut out the middleman, and in successive order; threatened us privately, banned it publically, banned us from using school facilites for the market, then rolled over and just pursued penny-ante retaliation against any organizations we were part of. $2000 to hook the video rental store into the school debit card network? Sure, why not, they only sell that identical verifone machine at Staples for $125
January 12th, 2009 at 11:31 am
This is a good plan:
http://blog.concord.org/archives/14-NSF-and-K12-Reform.html#extended
January 12th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Rich in PA: There is no reason that winning a government grant to write a textbook used across the country could not be just as prestigious and profitable (to the authors) as whatever we do to write textbooks commercially. What you’re doing is cutting out the middlemen.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:37 am
There’s some good stuff going on at http://www.ck12.org and http://fhsst.org/.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:43 am
It would be interesting to see a plot of the rise in the cost of textbooks compared to the increase in the salaries of public school teachers over the past 60 years or so.
One could also look at the cost of administration compared with the amount spent on actual classroom instruction.
Equally enlightening would be the cost of all the high tech equipment now installed in classrooms. Chalk and blackboards were pretty cheap compared with electronic white boards, video projectors and the cost of the multimedia material.
It’s funny that corporatization of education is never discussed when the teachers are being bashed for earning too much money and the claim that it is the unions that are behind all of this.
The situation in higher education is similar. A larger proportion of school expenses have nothing to do with classroom education, but are devoted to administration, sports and other tangential programs and a building craze.
One has only to look at a place like NYU which has reinvented itself over the past few decades and has now gobbled up most of what was left of Greenwich Village.
Education has become a big business, part of the NCLB fallout has been the rise of a for-profit industry devoted to providing advice to schools as well as the dozens of tutoring and parallel education services to help students along.
So instead of giving more money to schools to improve education we prefer to let parents bear the cost individually as the pay for private services.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:43 am
When I went to school the library was required to keep a copy of every required text at the reserve desk. I got tired, not just of buying, but also of carrying, and didn’t buy any required texts for the last two years.
Almost all books today are electronically typeset. There is no reason they couldn’t be available online.
The system you see today is nothing but a prolonged mulcting of students and their parents. It won’t change until we begin to actually believe we need educated people.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:46 am
It’s worth noting that this is going on in K-12 education already. For example, http://www.freereading.net is an open source, scientifically based early reading curriculum resource. The state of Florida recently approved freereading.net for use in Florida schools, which if you know anything about state textbook adoption policies is a big development.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:46 am
A lot of instructors are doing things along these lines. I teach part-time (statistics) and I publish extremely detailed class notes on my school’s intranet (as well as all the required problem sets, and all the tables needed for the class). My notes are so detailed that they really are a mini-textbook, and some of my students are able to skip buying the textbook altogether. Even for those who do buy the book, having an alternate online free text book enables them to buy one textbook for several students, sharing the cost.
I would LOVE to have an open-source place where I could post my notes so other instructors/statisticians could add stuff and improve them.
Another thing that I do (which many instructors could do) is tell my students that it’s OK if they buy a previous edition of the “official” textbook from Amazon or whereever. Textbook publishers rarely have any real reason for publishing new editions- they do it mostly to prevent students from getting by with used books.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Tom: Two things about that. (1) Anything that conjures up (correctly, in this case) images of a nationally-mandated curriculum would be poorly received by the professoriate, and I wouldn’t blame them. (2) Doing it via government grants doesn’t reduce the cost, it just sticks the government with the cost, socializing it onto the population in general. I’m not certain that’s a good idea even in progressive terms. Why should working class people pay stipends for a finance professor to write a textbook?
January 12th, 2009 at 11:47 am
I agree with Rich in PA: A significant cost, if not only the *only* cost, is compensation of the author. It takes time & effort to write a textbook, and extra time & effort to write a *good* textbook (free of typos & factual errors that actually teaches the material). To expect textbooks to be written for free is unrealistic.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:47 am
What’s always bothered me is how obvious the textbook companies are about the ripoff. Coming out with new editions of the standard calculus book for example.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Actually, where you get really screwed is not on the textbook, it is on the tuition. IF the knowledge in the textbook is not worth $100, then why would the course be worth $4000?
People really need to look at Stanford’s EPGY software to realize just how badly our $1 Trillion per year education system is fucking us. My son was bored with math in his K12 class, I signed him up for EPGY’s computer game type software (which tests the student as it goes along ) and he was working 2 years above grade level within a few months. The K12 school, of course, asked us to stop since he would exhaust all of the high school math offerings by 5th grade. They pointed out that kids entering college at age 14 “have social problems”.
If the Fortune 500 is going to make the Bachelors degree a job requirement, we need to allow people to earn the degree with online computer software provided they can pass the exams. If we cut out the wasteful, boring featherbedding our kids could finish college by age 18 and devote their considerable youthful energies to productive ,rewarding activities — instead of wasting 4 years of their lives and $160,000.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Tell that to your friend Paul Krugman. I had to buy his eighth edition international economics textbook for 150$ bucks last term.
High prices for textbooks seems endemic to the textbook concept, since it’s hard to see how you could ever establish a market with vigorous price-based competition for these things.
And the textbook industry is really different than the film industry or the software industry. Hopefully increased copyright infringement around textbooks and books will allow idealists like Matt to reconsider their stance on intellectual property rights.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Yeah, JohnnyD. Also unrealistic to expect encyclopedias to be written for free. And operating systems.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I think this discussion needs a little unpacking and clarifying.
While it is true that many of textbooks used in university classes make scads of money for everyone involved at the expense of the poor students (or, more often that not, the student’s parents), this is only part of the story. These high selling textbooks are a tiny fraction of published academic books and therein lies the real problem.
The textbook scam is a scam on multiple levels with different parties benefiting in different ways. As such, the incentive structure is complexly problematic.
As noted above, universities benefit by charging outrageous prices at their bookstores. This has started to change somewhat, however, given online services such as half.com. The prices that my university pays for used buy backs has gone up dramatically over the last few years.
Academic publishers benefit from high prices in that they would not otherwise be able to publish most textbooks and academic works without them.
Which brings us to the third, most interesting angle: professors. This is the real driver of the scam, IMO. Professors must publish so they need publishers who are willing to publish, which requires high prices, which requires university libraries willing to buy copies of books that likely will never be read. Publishers don’t see much of a profit from these books — for that they rely on the high-selling textbooks.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I’m proud to say that this will be the second semester of professoring for which I don’t require students to buy any textbooks. I’ve mostly gotten away with either (1) assigning students to online versions of old classics or (2) pointing them to journal articles available online through our university library.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I should add that I’m not sure we would want to lower prices IF it would mean that a lot of currently available research would suddenly become unavailable. There might be work arounds, of course…
January 12th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Re Rich in PA’s comment “Tom: Two things about that. (1) Anything that conjures up (correctly, in this case) images of a nationally-mandated curriculum would be poorly received by the professoriate, and I wouldn’t blame them. (2) Doing it via government grants doesn’t reduce the cost, it just sticks the government with the cost, socializing it onto the population in general. I’m not certain that’s a good idea even in progressive terms. Why should working class people pay stipends for a finance professor to write a textbook?”
————–
1) I don’t see why we should give a shit what the professoriate thinks — we have a $1 Trillion educational system and we produce a citizenry who are some of the most ignorant people on the fucking planet.
Our COLLEGE GRADUATES are largely ignorant of the most basic information: relative military and economic power of nations, who has the wealth and income, the input-output matrix of our industries that sustain our civilization, the status of the natural resource inventories on which we depend for life,etc etc etc. Our universities produce people who can not support themselves — people who have to go beg for a position at some major institution — government, academia, corporation, the military. That’s BY DESIGN not chance.
Our citizens are already paying for the wasteful, exploitative educational system. Not just in the direct and indirect support to Universities ( financial aid, research grants, massive tax breaks.) Our government accounts for roughly what –20 percent? of GDP. It hires –either directly or indirectly (federal contractors) — much of the product of this system.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Which brings us to the third, most interesting angle: professors. This is the real driver of the scam, IMO. Professors must publish so they need publishers who are willing to publish, which requires high prices, which requires university libraries willing to buy copies of books that likely will never be read. Publishers don’t see much of a profit from these books — for that they rely on the high-selling textbooks.
I’m not sure I follow you at the bolded part. Professors indeed do generally need to ‘publish or perish’, but not, AFAIK, necessarily books. The phrase refers to publishing research in journals. In fact, I imagine publishing a decent elementary textbook is probably rather less prestigious than getting a paper or two accepted in a top-shelf journal.
(Academic journals are of course yet another field that could and should be opened up. But that’s a whole other topic…)
January 12th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Most professors do not write textbooks. Few professors make actual profit off of writing books (texts or monographs). The majority of monographs will have only a limited readership, and thus academic presses must profit highly off of some books (texts) in order to compensate for the minimal (if any) profit they make off of others (in fact, it’s my understanding that most university presses are subsidized by their associated institutions). But we would all be fools if we said that just b/c a book has a limited readership it is not valuable. To argue that reveals a very limited idea of what education really is.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I imagine publishing a decent elementary textbook is probably rather less prestigious than getting a paper or two accepted in a top-shelf journal.
You imagine correctly.
On the off chance that anyone’s interested in the whole other topic about academic journals and how messed up it is that ordinary folks can’t read the research supported by their tax dollars without paying huge fees, I had a big post about it a while ago.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
All good points. It may vary by field, but in my experience books are indeed important. Getting a tenure track offer more or less depends on having at least one book and several journal articles. I agree that having a top-shelf journal on one’s CV would be more impressive than a book published by a disreputable publisher. But otherwise a book is almost always better.
Again, this is from my experience — I suppose it could vary from discipline to discipline.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Don (20): I agree that US college graduates are, as a group, more ignorant than other countries’ college graduates. But that’s because we send a higher proportion of people to college than other countries. College doesn’t actually make you smarter–not here, not in Singapore, not in 14th-century Oxford–so if we accept that intelligence is a curve, and that the US is going lower on the curve than other countries to stock its thousands of colleges and universities, you get what you get in terms of results.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I should add that I’m not sure we would want to lower prices IF it would mean that a lot of currently available research would suddenly become unavailable. There might be work arounds, of course…
I don’t see how this is a concern at all.
Academic research is not funded with textbook sales. (Not in general anyway, although it’s of course possible some of the more successful textbook authors have used their profits to self-fund their research.)
And the primary distribution channel for new research is the pseudo non-profit system of academic journals. ‘Open-source’ textbooks would be just as able to synthesize and publish that knowledge as ‘closed-source’ ones.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
There’s an open source textbook mix/remix effort underway at Rice University called Connexions (cnx.org). From the NY Times:
January 12th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Again, good points. I should stress that I agree that most research is published in journals. Academic research is not funded with textbooks but, in some significant part, it exists in books, that require someone to publish them, which requires money to the publisher.
I can tell you that a significant part of my dissertation research comes from low-selling, high-priced academic books that exist almost solely in university libraries.
I agree with your point about open-sourced journals.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Also, this is somewhat orthogonal to the main point, but my understanding is that at least a large portion of this cost growth is actually purely the costs of the medium – printing costs. So things like full-color textbooks on fancy paper can cost an order of magnitude more than black and white. Yet publishers send out good-looking samples, and out-of-touch professors order them…
January 12th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
You can actually take this one step further. Most professors do not profit off making textbooks. Textbooks for junior and senior level classes sell okay, but they are not runaway best sellers, even if they are the most popular books in their field. The reason is that students specialize as they become upperclassmen, and so those classes are just much smaller. I have a colleague who has THE textbook for database courses in computer science departments, and the income from this is just an occasional bonus. He certainly could not live off of it (even if he tried by dropping his standard of living).
Introductory courses are another matter. Adoption of a calculus textbook at a university is MAJOR business, as it is taken (in some form) by the majority of freshmen. However, this is also incredibly cut throat. As a mathematics professor, a publisher sends you a new calculus textbook — for evaluation purposes — every month, trying to get you to switch. Introductory computer science textbooks are the same way (but not nearly as lucrative as calculus). Technically, I am not allowed to sell them used book sellers, but I give them away to students.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I know people in textbook publishing, and every so often someone comes along with a great idea: “textbooks are expensive, and the vast majority of students outside of Harvard are strapped for cash. why not come out with an inexpensive book for the subject (Calculus) and compete on price?”
It doesn’t work. Professors/instructors make the purchasing decisions, and except for the rare idealist they choose on features (art, extra topics, online resources) rather than price, because they don’t pay the price.
Hence, publishers compete on features, and it legitimately costs a lot of money to develop the four color artwork and online quizzes and interactive study guides and instructors manuals that you likely never used or appreciated.
I think the situation is worse for open source works- not only would they be very inferior in terms of features (color art, interactive resources etc.) but they wouldn’t have a publisher’s guarantee of methodical fact-checking, only the ad-hoc fact-checking that open source projects (like Wikipedia) get. The idealists would still bite, probably the same ones running Linux on their home computer, but I don’t think it would get much traction beyond the EFF crowd.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Walker — my dissertation head once told us the sum total of his royalties on his book. If memory serves it was less than $10.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
What Anne E. said. While it’s been 11 years since I’ve been in the classroom, my experience back in the 1980s and 1990s was that almost all calculus textbooks looked pretty much the same, ditto elementary stats texts, ditto precalc, etc.
It wouldn’t be too hard or cost much for a state to pay a few professors to write a series of math textbooks for all the freshman-sophomore level courses, and post it to the Web with a creative-commons license.
I would LOVE to have an open-source place where I could post my notes so other instructors/statisticians could add stuff and improve them.
I’ve got an idea: create a blog, titled “Anne E.’s Open-Soure Statistics Text” or some such, post each section as a blog post, and state that your sole requirement on reuse is that any reuse, alterations, or improvements must be posted on the Web, with a link to the reuse, etc. in your comments section.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Well, yes, but the crappy, no-frills, unadorned ones aren’t cheap, either.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I can tell you that a significant part of my dissertation research comes from low-selling, high-priced academic books that exist almost solely in university libraries.
It sounds like the sort of books you’re talking about here are more or less just book-length academic papers. I.e., not student or general public oriented, intended for a highly specialized (and small) audience. The publisher is really serving mostly a gatekeeper function, but they charge very high prices to cover fixed printing costs, and because they’re mostly selling to institutional buyers with fairly deep pockets.
I think most of the arguments for a more open, electronic academic journal system apply to these as well…
January 12th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
All good points. It may vary by field, but in my experience books are indeed important. Getting a tenure track offer more or less depends on having at least one book and several journal articles.
Perhaps in the humanities, but not in the sciences, math, or engineering. Publishing a book is actually a negative in terms of getting tenure in many fields.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Yeah, that is what I’m talking about. You may be right. Now it’s just a matter of restructuring academic culture to accept open-sourced sources as legitimate publications. Publishers aren’t just going to roll over and play dead. It may be a very long time before an open-sourced cite on one’s CV will pack as much ivory tower-cred as a fancy pants brick and mortar publishing house.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Yeah, I’m in the humanities. That’s interesting. I’m not surprised that it’s different in other fields but I am surprised that it’s actually a negative (rather than less important than a journal).
January 12th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I think a lot of the problem lies with the Profs. They are constantly changing which textbooks are needed for their courses, which does not allow for used book purchases or sales.
I know that I dropped a macro-economics course one spring after a few weeks and I kept my textbook for the course because I planned to take the course again another semester. I then took the course the following spring with the same professor and had to buy a brand spanking new textbook because he changed it. Since the prof teaching in the fall used a different book I was unable to sell either book back to the bookstore or future students. Pathetic, I wound up spending ~$250 on what should have cost me $25
January 12th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Trig o Treat – I don’t know any universities that require that a faculty member produce a book length monograph in order to get a tenure track OFFER(your post #24). Do you mean in order to get tenure?
January 12th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Who says textbooks are overpriced? How many people know how much it costs to produce a textbook, get state approvals and distribute it?
Textbooks are published in a large format, full of art whose rights must be purchased by the publisher, are written in extremely complex subjects that not just anyone can write, must be extremely carefully edited to make sure we don’t teach a generation of kids that America was founded in 1492 and must get government approval in 50 states (plus a few cities like NYC, Detroit, etc.).
And the same people complaining about new editions coming out would be complaining about all the outdated/stale info if publishers didn’t release new editions.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Yeah, that is what I’m talking about. You may be right. Now it’s just a matter of restructuring academic culture to accept open-sourced sources as legitimate publications. Publishers aren’t just going to roll over and play dead. It may be a very long time before an open-sourced cite on one’s CV will pack as much ivory tower-cred as a fancy pants brick and mortar publishing house.
It’s an uphill battle, no question.
I’d point out one thing though, which is to distinguish between textbooks, which I think is what Matt’s mostly talking about – e.g., intermediate calculus texts – and these other ‘books’ that belong more in the realm of journal articles.
The description ‘open-source’ doesn’t really apply to the latter at all, because they’ll still be written by the same one or two people – who will still be writing them for reasons other than financial. And they’ll still need to go through some kind of a ‘publisher’ analogue who acts as a gate keeper and prestige signal. (But who, unlike today’s academic publishers, won’t artificially restrict the flow of that knowledge by charging $300 a copy…)
January 12th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
GMS — It’s not a university or even department requirement. And I’m exaggerating somewhat — it would certainly be easier to get a position offer than tenure.
But from personal experience, the vast, or almost vast, majority of both those who teach in our department and those who have graduated from it and gone on to get tenure track positions elsewhere, have a book on their CV. It is certainly true and commonly understood that having a book on the CV greatly increases your chances.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
T or T – I am curious as to what field you are in. You are correct that a book increases the chances exponentially. But I guess you must be talking about people a few years out (i.e. who did not get a tenure track right after getting the PhD).
Unfortunately, I think that with the glut of PhDs, the requirement of a book to even GET a job is going to spread from your field into others (like my own, where most of my colleagues do get a tenure track job with a year or two of graduation, and generally before they get the contract). Thus graduate school poverty is going to continue to both lengthen and broaden.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
GMS–I’m in International Studies/Relations within Political Science. A big part of the stringent ‘requirements’ is The Glut. I’ve all but given up on academia as a mid-career switch because it.
What’s your field?
January 12th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Ever since I’ve purchased Kindle, I spend most of time buying Kindle-friendly books than actual books.
Can’t find the Holocaust Industry on Amazon.com though.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
To T – I’m in history (in a non-western area). The ‘Glut’ has already hit the Americanists, and I imagine will soon spread.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
I can’t speak for school texts, which I know nothing about, but I do work in the college text business. It’s not all that profitable. One comment (only) did give part of the publisher’s perspective, the way prof decisions turn on things that are costly: (1) color and other production values and (2) freebies, such as student Web sites and instructor test banks.
And no question a lot of this is sheer fluff, although it stems in part from a feeling that students need more accessible books these days. In turn, publishers look for ways to make them more than fluff, since then the features make a bigger impact on sale. Thus, an author will do a lot of work rounding up good images of organisms and ecosystems for a biology text, and a publisher will think about how color coding and 3D can make molecular models or diagrams of processes more effective.
It’s also been noted already that a top seller in many a course is only a few thousand copies, so we don’t get the economies of scale that novels do. But I’ll mention three other factors that haven’t been mentioned but drive up prices even more. First, of course a lot of books bomb, but they had to be developed and produced anyhow.
Second, the constant cycle of new editions costs more to publish, and profs do have a way of adopting the latest text in many a market. (Do you cover the latest news on global warming or types of brain scans enough? That other book does.) Last, publishers have such frequent new editions to put a dent in the supply of used books, which mean that a book makes any money only in its first year. Used books are also a reason for some freebies, such as codes giving access to Web sites, again feeding costs.
The used book market is way more efficient than ever, too, now that independent college bookstores have given way to chains and students can buy online. A bookstore down the street, if it needs more used books, can search its stock nationwide for used books.
It’s self-sustaining: if students can’t afford books, they’ll demand used books, and so on. Some publishers do compete on price, while another which will remain nameless has intentionally taken a higher-price route, figuring it’ll get away with slightly lower sales that way. There are far fewer competitors than 20 years ago, owing to mergers, but the competition is still fierce, even within a company for sales-rep attention. I wish I had an answer. A year ago, the other divisions of this company (academic and trade) kept us afloat.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I’m proud to say that this will be the second semester of professoring for which I don’t require students to buy any textbooks.
This makes you the best teacher in the history of teaching.
Every student across the country should, when it comes time to do professor evals, suggest that their professors do the same thing.
Law school textbooks are especially egregious ripoffs. Most of them consist almost entirely of excerpts from cases that you could find on the internet for free, or at least for free on the Westlaw subscription that you get with your tuition. It’s pure dickery to tell students they have to buy a casebook that costs as much as $125 for Constitutional Law, which is just Supreme Court cases which are publicly available and which even a total computer neophyte could find with Google.
Until it stops, I wish people would start uploading textbooks to torrent sites like they do with music and movies.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Matt, thanks for posting on this issue. I work for a major university’s library system, and one of my tasks is to provide copies of the more expensive (often General Education…read “I won’t have any need for this after the quarter”) textbooks for undergraduates to utilize. The reason this issue comes about every now and then (most often in difficult economic climates) is because there is no easy fix.
For one, many commenters are right to mention the bells and whistles added to many textbooks today. Publishers must convince professors (who, as has been said, do not pay for the material they select) to buy their book based on added features. These are not only well-illustrated molecules, but also access to online help-centers and special downloadable video/audio content. All of this looks good in a sales pitch, but most undergrads won’t bother with it (we don’t offer up the extra content at the library, and not a single student has ever requested it). The professors that are hip to this will often make a much more heartbreaking decision: to go with a lower-priced, “custom” textbook. These are often selected chapters from the full book, sold at only one campus bookstore in a “binder ready” (read loose-leaf) form. These books, while initially lower in cost than the full text, are non-returnable and can vary by section, let alone course.
This last part brings up the elephant that few undergraduates admit is in the room: students feel entitled to receiving an end-of-term cash stimulus in the form of returning their textbooks. I hear from the undergraduate student government that their constituency is fed-up with high-priced textbooks, but never is a young person more scorned than when they are told they won’t be getting some quick cash for their book. Online, open-source textbook material will not change the price of a margarita in Cabo.
All parties involved must be willing to take a hit (be it money or academic freedom/integrity) if this challenge is to ever be taken seriously. Professors will always be wary of attempts at outside control of the content of their courses, publishers will continue to find inventive if not counterproductive ways of selling material, and students will continue to consider some textbooks a waste of money and lament the costs.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Until it stops, I wish people would start uploading textbooks to torrent sites like they do with music and movies.
They do.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
You just described the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Until it stops, I wish people would start uploading textbooks to torrent sites like they do with music and movies.
It’s actually interesting, and might worth an academic paper about which books get uploaded and which don’t. The catalogues on torrent sites are very far from having the completeness of the music or movie archives, but there are tens of thousands of academic books out there. It varies by field, there are more computer science books than Italian History. Varies interestingly. Quality (scans vs books piblished online) of course also varies.
It would say something about the meatworld distribution of academic work. Who would have, say, every academic work published about Dante for the last twenty years, and among those, who would be likely to upload?
I also presume that there, besides the int’l torrent sites, toreent sharing occurring at individual universities, or within undergraduate fields.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
As a first-time author of an intermediate-level college science textbook, I find it amusing to think that my months of intensive hard work could be replaced by an open-source document written by a group of people who do it for free. I think that those who advocate a wiki-type approach to textbooks underestimate (1) the time and expertise that it takes to really research all the facts and arguments in any text; and (2) the importance of an integrated approach to writing. For (2) in particular, I think it is important to note that a text is not an encylcopedia. The latter requires no integration, and can be done in bits and pieces by whomever is an expert. A text (at least a good one) requires an integrated, synthetic writing style that cross-references and builds upon material presented in earlier chapters. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to read a group-written text in which numerous people contribute bits and pieces.
I also want to reinforce the points that others have made about earnings from texts. Most intermediate-level and advanced texts make very little money for the professor. Sure, calc and intro psych texts will bring in the big bucks, but beyond that, the profs are not making much at all from textbooks. In my own case, I am doing it because I think I am good at it and can make a contribution to my subfield, not because I expect to earn much at all.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
except, you know, college professors like to write their own text books for their own classes, especially if they teach large lectures.
And then, the really slick ones create a new edition every 2 to 3 years without any material changes. Just the opportunity to prevent students from buying used books that oligopoly bookstores on campus sell for 10% lower than list.
The super slick ones create a workbook that can only be used once, and is mandatory.
Jack – that’s pretty smart, but thanks to the internet, there may be an easier way to facilitate such things.
1. Google docs spreadsheet which anyone can read (but only you can edit)
2. People email you the books they want listed, preferably in a similarly formatted excel file so you can just cut and paste.
3. Include title, author, edition, contact email address (a gmail address would be best), and university where the book/owner is at.
People contact the owner directly to acquire a text book. The listing should be set up alphabetically by book name so that people can easily contact multiple persons at once. The actual acquisition details are worked out via email.
If you get good enough participation, people should be expected to give their books away in exchange for the opportunity to acquire the book they need for free (shipping charges excluded).
All you need is word of Facebook to make it happen.
Or something like that. You college kids are pretty bright.
Just take it where the administrator’s can’t see. Use anonymous gmail addresses to conduct business.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I think that its very difficult to generalize about this at the college level. There are a very few, limited courses where a general open-source text could work very well for a number of years, like say Intro to Calculus, where most all students take some version of the course, and basic, fundamental Calculus hasn’t changed all that much in the past 40-50 years.
In other fields, such as mine– also International Relations within Poli Sci– things change and you need a new text. The major text we use does get updated every other year, but often that’s necessary, as you need a text that discusses the creation of the Department of Homeland Security or the development of counterinsurgency approaches to dealing with terrorism or the emergence of Constructivist theory.
I also think its important to keep in mind the difference between an intro-level text designed for a mass market which covers the most fundamental concepts of a field and an intermediate / upper-level text designed for a more specialized course for majors within the field that demands the latest information on the subject.
I also teach a US foreign policy course, and there are about 5 major Foreign Policy texts. I always use the most up to date text when I teach this class as things have changed, and I need a chapter on intelligence reform or homeland security that older books don’t have. But there are also fewer students in these courses overall than the intro course, and so its a much smaller market.
I also think that there’s the idea that someone is getting rich off poor students as they pay these high prices.
I don’t know anyone getting rich off a textbook.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
I don’t know anyone getting rich off a textbook.
Oh, I do. I saw the gold Rolls Royce that the author bought with the proceeds. Now, that may well be an exceptional case, but if your textbook becomes the standard for that field — especially in relatively non-controversial subjects — then it’s a gold mine.
(And Trig or Treat is right about the low-sale, high-priced monograph as the building block of an academic career in the humanities.)
January 12th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I’m with JohnH. I was in legal publishing, and it’s not a huge cash cow or anything like that. I don’t know if bookstores were ripping people off or not, but our base costs are pretty high at such a small print run. Sure, it’d be better for everyone if we delivered electronically, but nobody has any idea how the business survives that way.
Having said that, this end of the business could probably go open-source. Law professors typically aren’t in it for the money themselves; they’ve got other ways to make the big bucks. And truth be told, they probably provide their own copyediting services too (which says something about the way both law firms and universities manage their businesses, but it’s not the publisher’s problem). Really, the main thing the publisher does is marketing and sales.
But marketing’s the thing. How do you get professors to switch to an open-source alternative? What’s their incentive? They like the current method just fine. We’re pushing updated texts on them all the time. They don’t have to search for updated texts, and they don’t have to pay for them; why wouldn’t they want to stay with this model forever?
January 12th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
There are about 300 copies of the previous edition of the Mankiw econ textbook for sale on Amazon. Why not teach from the earlier edition? It’s not like new economic principles have been discovered in the last four years.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
They’ll demand the used books, but they have little to no say over the situation. So it really is self-sustaining for you in the publishing business, but not for those that actually have to buy the books.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
That Spivak Calculus book in the picture is fantastic.
January 13th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Second, the constant cycle of new editions costs more to publish, and profs do have a way of adopting the latest text in many a market. (Do you cover the latest news on global warming or types of brain scans enough? That other book does.)
Profs don’t want to adopt the latest text on the market; publishers force us to upgrade editions by moving pages around and altering the exercises. In departments like mathematics, 90% of students are taking material from the 1600s (calculus) or earlier. Even in sciences like physics, few students take classes past century old topics like special relativity. Every once in a while, someone approaches a topic in a fundamentally different and more effective way like Needham in his Visual Complex Analysis, and it’s worth moving to a new textbooks, but profs in most fields (biology is an exception) don’t need or want yet another edition of the same old text every few years.
As a first-time author of an intermediate-level college science textbook, I find it amusing to think that my months of intensive hard work could be replaced by an open-source document written by a group of people who do it for free. I think that those who advocate a wiki-type approach to textbooks underestimate (1) the time and expertise that it takes to really research all the facts and arguments in any text; and (2) the importance of an integrated approach to writing. For (2) in particular, I think it is important to note that a text is not an encylcopedia.
I agree that (2) is important, but it’s rare in freshmen and sophomore level textbooks, who are generally written by a wide variety of people over a large amount of time, ensuring that the text isn’t at all integrated. The first edition might have had coherence of style and intent, but by the fifth edition, the book is twice the size and has ten or more times as many people working on it.
January 13th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I think that Zon partially contradicts himself, at least in spirit… He writes: I find it amusing to think that my months of intensive hard work could be replaced by an open-source document written by a group of people who do it for free.
Who’s to say that people wouldn’t spend months of hard work to create something for “free”?
He himself says: Most intermediate-level and advanced texts make very little money for the professor. [snip] In my own case, I am doing it because I think I am good at it and can make a contribution to my subfield, not because I expect to earn much at all.
So in fact, he himself is doing the work almost for free… It’s a pretty short path from “almost free” to “free”, especially for a faculty member at an institution that would reward this kind of work. Of course, the problem of universities undervaluing teaching is an old and familiar issue, but there are certainly a lot of places that do pay attention to this kind of thing. I do suspect that there is a lottery-ticket aspect to many professors’ motivation to write textbooks — the small chance of the gold Rolls mentioned by one of the commenters above. But if you’re willing to pass up the 1-in-10000 chance of a bestseller that makes you a millionaire, and you’re paid a decent income by a college or university to work on things that move teaching in your field forward, why not put a Creative Commons license on your work and let people use it for free?
(By the way, I’ll take the opportunity to plug a very nice set of free physics textbooks, written by a friend of mine.)
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