Open Source Comes to Textbooks

[pack34]

Source:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/education/open-source-comes-to-textbooks

Think back to your college textbooks. What?s the first thing you think of? How expensive they were, of course. Okay, we?ll come back to that. What?s the second thing you think of? How good some of them were. And the third thing? How long-lived they are.

For example, my father had an M.B.A. The text I think he used for his financial management class is now in its 13th edition, has been in print for more than 45 years, and made its author, Eugene Brigham, a wealthy man, according to an article on the website Poets & Quants. Maybe very wealthy: The book retails for $243. Sure, it?s 1184 pages, but still, that?s a lot of money, about 20 cents a page. By comparison, a popular book like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is less than 6 cents a page.

What makes for a decades-long success like Brigham?s? Quality is certainly one factor, but another is inertia. The Poets & Quants article quotes an executive at McGraw-Hill, which publishes a competing textbook, as saying, ?It can be difficult to get professors to change the books they use.?

It kind of reminds you of the enduring success of that testament to inertia in the software world, Microsoft Windows. And just as Windows? success finally inspired a viable open-source alternative, we?re starting to see open-source textbooks as well.

One of the most serious efforts is a project called OpenStax College, based out of Rice University. Later this month, it will release two textbooks: College Physics and Introduction to Sociology. The textbooks will run on an ?open education platform? called Connexions?spelled with an x?that already draws a million visitors a month. OpenStax College may well give the standard texts in those two fields a real run for their money.

Really cool idea. I hope this takes off. It may be too late for this to benefit me in college but, being free, this may be a really good tool to keep fresh on the basics.

[Elliott]

Love the idea, but they have to be careful to not get a reputation for inaccuracy like Wikipedia.

[pack34]

Love the idea, but they have to be careful to not get a reputation for inaccuracy like Wikipedia.

From my understanding, changes to the textbooks aren't exactly directly open to everyone, but heavily moderated and written by professors.