Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t change much is hard. There’s a need for publishers but just not a need for one that charges hundreds of dollars for a textbook. It might not be economically feasible to have a publisher put out quality textbooks for less money but I can’t justify forcing my students to spend $200 to $300 per semester on a math textbook.
One thing to keep in mind is that publishers don't publish books to appeal to students. Their client are faculty members. So they include things like websites that handle grading online homework/quizzes. Faculty are going to use what makes their job easier. With pay not commensurate with level of education I understand why faculty have this mindset. Personally I think it's bad to use the online homework/quizzing systems out there.
That's what Dover Books[1] and its series on Mathematics[2] are for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Publications
[2] http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mathematics.ht...
My current institution's nursing school has a set text called "Calculate with Confidence", which teaches the kids to calculate concentrations, unit conversions, measurement uncertainty and similar things. Someone might say that these are essential skills in nursing, and they are, but the incoming students are supposed to have learned these things from their college science courses, from their degree that got them admitted into nursing school. Yet here it is again because all previous education didn't take.
60 % of incoming students at my institution must take remedial math, up from 50 % a few years ago.
That's community college. If you think that's cynical or exaggerated you are insufficiently cynical.
I'm still looking for the sources. I would like to compile them to epub format
Here are some links to other OER textbooks aggregators from my bookmarks:
https://www.cccoer.org/learn/find-oer/open-textbooks/ https://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/14/the-price-i... http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/c.php?g=160393&p=1053364 https://textbooks.opensuny.org/browse-oer/ http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/mathematics-reviews/ https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections
Good to see that OpenStax is a 501(c)(3) charity, which is the nonprofit classification where donations are tax-deductible and thus restricted. That makes it harder for the organization to be influenced too directly by sponsors, since donations cannot be used for purposes which would yield direct marketplace advantage.
I also see that they use a permissive, attribution-based license for their publications. That makes it easier for businesses to consume those materials and also to contribute.
> The Creative Commons Attribution license that you and every author must agree to enables the content to be as reusable as possible.
The combination of 501(c)(3) and business-friendly licensing reminds me of the Apache Software Foundation. The more orgs using that formula, the better!
That even applies to books: I've gotten a good number of inquiries from college bookstores asking if instructors can sell copies. They are worried that money is changing hands, when students buy a physical copy, and I am not getting any of it. I am glad those folks are looking out for my rights, but my point here is that "you can't sell it" is a more complex restriction than at least I (in no way a lawyer) thought when I first started doing this.
I think the 501(c)(3) is the more crucial point above. For what it's worth, both the Free Software Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation are 501(c)(3). Restricting the use of donations to avoid commercial advantage makes it much harder to subvert the nonprofit.
The GPL does not strike me as the license to use for text books (since it asks for source code an such) and I think the FSF has state that the GPL isn't a good idea for documentation, I'd carry that to books too.
- Content production and editing
- Improving the design and branding of open textbook purveyors
- Advocating for the adoption of open source textbooks in your local K-12 system and community colleges (especially the more cash-strapped ones)
I know of no organization that attempts to organize community efforts in these directions, though. If there is one, I'd love to know about it and get involved. If not, maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
[0] https://www.ck12.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexBook
"Do you have .epub versions of your books?
We no longer support .epub versions of our OpenStax books. Only a small percentage (around 1 percent) of OpenStax readers reported using the .epub format, and maintaing these versions is costly; instead, we focus on providing our online web view, PDF, iBooks, Amazon, and print versions. You can see what formats are available for your subject at OpenStax.org."
I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font.
They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a single file. Or it's just an online PDF reader. Besides that, iBooks is based on EPUB, and older Kindle files are based on MobiPocket, which is based on OEBPS, the precursor of EPUB. Amazon has gratis software to convert from EPUB to Kindle file format. The print versions are probably functionally identical to PDF, with printing and cutting margins added to the page size.
If they maintained the book source in EPUB, all other formats that they do provide are essentially free, and can be maintained with a conversion program, a shell script, and cron job.
The real reason is that a lot of the available EPUB readers do not render web pages consistently, and they don't want to test Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc.
With epub format the page # will vary depending on font size.
There's probably other reasons as well, but that's one that I've heard mentioned.
(Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)
[0] https://github.com/openstax/openstax-cms
[1] https://wagtail.io/Also, OpenStax currently has pretty widespread adoption: See http://news.rice.edu/2018/08/01/48-percent-of-colleges-2-2-m...
(Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)
For some of these though, I feel like it would be nice if an "order" was established between different books (or the lack thereof mentioned). At least, I do not immediately seem to spot a mention of this.
What I mean is that I assume College Physics comes before University Physics, but at what point are you ready to start Astronomy? Also, where does College Physics for AP Courses fit in? (that might be more obvious for Americans?) How about the Biology books, do I need them for Anatomy?
In practice, many choose to use the books as is, as they're already pretty high quality, but if you go to cnx.org and do some searches on the database, you'll find a number of variations that have been created by different professors and universities as well.
I don't think the intent (or resources) is there to give you every book for every course in a pre-selected order.
Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and OpenStax CNX, although I haven't been there for several years, so my understanding may be out of date.
They are all a part of Rice University and based out of Houston, and have been pursuing the goal of providing open education resources since the 1990s.
They're also open source and active on GitHub: https://github.com/Connexions https://github.com/openstax
Source/Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and developer for Connexions and later OpenStax CNX.
I found some pagination / page break issues (e.g. page 379 in Intro Statistics is empty and the transition from 381 to 382 also has a weird orphan problem). The same section also has section numbering problems. Edit: Reading more, I see a ton of equations that aren't rendered very well (page 405 in intro stats, look at all of the \bar{x} in the first half -- is this even using LaTeX to render or is this like a bad Microsoft Word equation editor thing?)
In the statistics world, OpenIntro Statistics -- https://www.openintro.org/stat/ -- seems quite a lot better as a textbook