Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Textbook manifesto (2016)

greenteapress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–166 of 166 posts

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#161

Post by lvh »

kazagistar wrote: post #153
lvh wrote: post #32

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally,…

The only time we had to use a professor written paperback textbook the quality was abysmal and the layout unusable.

I don't have any data to objectively support the textbook quality, but overall I generally preferred them to standard textbooks. Perhaps how common it is impacts quality.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#162

Post by SolarNet »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #133
SolarNet wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic we should get rid of property, since the property holder has a monopoly on the property. I would put "(i.e. opposite of a free market)" sarcastically, but I'm being serious. Go read an economics text book on the definition of a free market, and while you are at it, what properties they have (muh freedom is not even a primary one) that make us want them so much, and what the requirements are (natural mon…

An important distinction between physical and intellectual property is that physical is naturally exclusive, while intellectual is not. If I use a house for something, you cannot use it for something else without disturbing me. On the other hand my using some technology does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. (Although I may prefer to have an exclusive right for obvious reasons.) Maybe it could be a good id…

> On the other hand my using some technology does not prevent anyone else from doing the same.

Yes, however, for the same reason people can own summer homes they don't use for half a year and retain that exclusivity - even though it wouldn't disturb the people - is because they worked for that. They built it, or paid someone who did. We allow people to enforce their exclusive rights on property even when it wouldn't disturb them to let others use it.

Similarly, if I spend a billion dollars building a piece of technology, I should be able to own that. And decide who gets to use it, even if giving it away to everyone wouldn't disturb me. If someone else built their own version of my software (like building their own summer home) they could give theirs away for free (open source) or sell it. But if they broke into my summer home, rented it out, and then left everything exactly the way it was, that's still illegal because they profited from my property, my work.

If you believe in private property (rather than say personal property, which would allow you to own a house exclusive to other people, but not to own multiple properties and only use one at a time) it's hypocritical to not believe in some form of copyright (unless you are advocating for feudalism, where work does not count as value, and the owners of the land or tools worked get the products of the labor by default).

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#163

Post by SolarNet »

Nullabillity wrote: post #131
SolarNet wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic we should get rid of property, since the property holder has a monopoly on the property. I would put "(i.e. opposite of a free market)" sarcastically, but I'm being serious. Go read an economics text book on the definition of a free market, and while you are at it, what properties they have (muh freedom is not even a primary one) that make us want them so much, and what the requirements are (natural mon…

> e.g. if I built a house on my land that looks exactly like my neighbors, I still own my property and the house; but if I took their house and put it on my property I wouldn't Uhm, no, that's exactly what copyright prevents (or tries to, anyhow).

Again, you are thinking patents or trademarks.

My house may look the same, but it's been built by different people, different electricians, on different land. It probably has a different internal structure, different materials, and slightly different external marks, because it was rebuilt from the ground up.

Copyright would apply if I used the exact same blueprints, but if I hired an architect to make blueprints with the same external design as another house that would be similar to clean room design and not a violation of copyright. Like how Google can make a copy of the Java API (they only got hit for having the same implementation written by the guy who wrote the version oracle had copyrighten in the first place).

In the analogy it would be theft if I took your house, put it on my land, and claimed it was mine. And that's what it is to commit criminal copyright violation (e.g. you distribute copies for profit, claiming you own it). Yes in the digital world copies don't deprive the other of anything tangible, but like stealing a house, it does deprive them of the work that was invested to build that expression in the first place.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#164

Post by appendix »

richardbatty wrote: post #107
pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

Librarian here...many university libraries here actually have policies against purchasing textbooks.

The reason being, there is just not enough in the materials budgets to purchase textbooks for every class (especially considering that after a year, many will be "outdated" and need to be replaced) and still have enough money to purchase all the other necessary materials (mostly database subscriptions which cost an arm and a leg, but all the other books they need to purchase as well). However, practically speaking, we can often get copies of individual textbooks on an as-needed basis through interlibrary loan. Usually someone somewhere has a copy, but it's not a solution that can be applied on a university-wide level.

Often a professor will put a copy (that they own) on reserve so it may be used within the library, but those can't be checked out and taken home for use for the entire semester.

Personally, I think it's shameful we don't have a better solution, but that's the state of things here. Many schools are turning toward open educational resources (OER) but it's slow to adopt, because many professors have a favorite textbook and OER texts aren't always of the same quality as mainstream texts. It's a really frustrating situation.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#165

Post by Baeocystin »

abakker wrote: post #146
gwillen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market. Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a…

My wife works for a major textbook publisher. Not all those free textbooks or cheap textbooks are the same quality as the ones produced by big evil corporations. Frequently, when looking at competitors books, she will find more typos, fewer citations, out of date studies with small sample sizes, poor quality graphics, and sometimes just wrong information. Big books are expensive because the companies frequently worry…

Looking back, I can think of one or two professionally-done textbooks I used that were really good. (The Campbell biology books in particular were stellar.) The amount of work that must have gone in to their creation was enormous, and I am thankful for them.

But there were not enough of them. For every worth-the-purchase, there were a dozen of middling to genuine crap quality, and every single one was painfully expensive.

I genuinely feel for the good folks that I know are stuck in the system. But the current model can't die fast enough.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#166

Post by igk »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #97
igk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was in the students union for my faculty. We pulled out all stops to make things as efficient and cheap as possible(we actually sold them below cost because we found other ways to subsidise them). 10ish euro maximum performance semester for all the textbooks that were used in the classes, and printing thesis was 50 % of the next cheapest option... if we had doubled our prices. We also did "university politics", basic…

>We also did "university politics", basically creating pressure for professors to make good textbooks. I typeset one myself for a professor who wanted to "beat" another one. Out of curiosity, how would his textbook beat another colleague's?

Nicer diagrams, better structure, better writing, students being happy with the script, students grades
Post reply on HN