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OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

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Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#51

Post by HarryHirsch »

skh wrote: post #47
krn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The OP is talking about teaching community college mathematics. That's not introductory university mathematics; if you are lucky it's Pythagoras' Theorem and quadratic equations. W. W. Sawyer's books, such as Mathematician's Delight[1] and Vision in Elementary Mathematics[2], seem to be exactly for this audience. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486462404/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/048642555X/

I looked at the books. They seem really nice but are not feasible for use in the classroom for the courses that we teach.

I would agree with that statement.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#52

Post by nickpsecurity »

waterhouse wrote: post #50
nickpsecurity wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often suggest Wikimedia use their excess money not spent on Wikipedia itself to create low-cost or openly-licensed textbooks. If adopted by schools, students everywhere would save money on textbooks that were high quality. The collection would grow over time as both revenue and donations come in. They might also do something similar to Coursera. Textbooks just seemed like they'd be easier project with large, positi…

There is something called Wikibooks, though I've only spent maybe half an hour reading a particular wikibook years ago and can't speak to overall quality: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Yeah but I wasnt impressed with the quality when I looked at them. Im talking about paying good writers and illustrators to do stuff students would actually want to buy. Then, price it affordably. Maybe even tiered with a default price plus discounts for smaller institutions.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#53

Post by andrepd »

rectang wrote: post #36
greglindahl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CC "share-alike" option and the CC "non-commercial" option are orthogonal for exactly this reason.

Even so, complying with share-alike licenses is more costly than complying with attribution-based licenses. Consider what it takes to rectify license violation (either inadvertent or deliberate). Officially, the full force of copyright law can be brought down, but historically neither tradition wants that -- they just want to bring violators into compliance for future distribution. For share-alike, derivative works m…

Do you know what would be even more costly? Not having the free content in the first place, ffs. Quit whining just because you have to comply with the licence imposed by someone who is giving up their work for free.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#54

Post by keithpeter »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #25
krn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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...

The OP is talking about teaching community college mathematics. That's not introductory university mathematics; if you are lucky it's Pythagoras' Theorem and quadratic equations. The purpose of community college is to provide the students with a degree certificate that they can use for another degree. My current institution's nursing school has a set text called "Calculate with Confidence", which teaches the kids to…

UK: GCSE Maths for adults who missed out at school. A typical year of evening classes looks like this...

http://www.maths91.uk/2017/

This is the baseline for most progression to university and to what we call level 3 courses (the course that gets you into university)

Textbooks: Pearson, Collins, Stanley Thornes all sell 500 page tomes with lots of exercises in them - widely available in local bookshops for about £20 to £25. More popular are the revision guide/workbook sets for about £10. A popular example of a revision guide...

https://www.cgpbooks.co.uk/Student/books-gcse-maths-range.bo...

(CGP Books is actually quite an interesting company who started as a group of teachers self-publishing.)

Many teachers in the UK provide guides, videos and worksheets. There are a couple of web sites providing curated indexes of resources aimed at teachers...

http://www.skillsworkshop.org/

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources

and the BBC has got involved (and does some nice quality stuff)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/0/

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#55

Post by dougmccune »

logfromblammo wrote: post #35
tssva wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their support site. "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 OpenS…

> maintaing these versions is costly 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 si…

They used to do it and made an intentional decision to stop. They say it’s because it was costly. You come along and say they’re lying (meanwhile acknowledging the testing burden). I don’t get it. You think this non-profit, dedicated to the widespread distribution of their content, has some unspoken nefarious reason to deny you ePub versions?

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#56

Post by logfromblammo »

dougmccune wrote: post #55
logfromblammo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaing these versions is costly 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 si…

They used to do it and made an intentional decision to stop. They say it’s because it was costly. You come along and say they’re lying (meanwhile acknowledging the testing burden). I don’t get it. You think this non-profit, dedicated to the widespread distribution of their content, has some unspoken nefarious reason to deny you ePub versions?

I am unsatisfied with their explanation for discontinuing EPUB. "Too costly" is a subjective judgment, and they did not reveal the objective measurements or methods they used to reach it. A pack of gum is costly if you already spent all your money on something else.

With the knowledge of what they do continue to support, I suspect that some of the costs they are paying for maintenance are the result of poor architectural decisions. If all book formats had a common source format, supporting any particular book format would be a matter of maintaining a compiler/converter for it, which could be a large initial cost followed by a lower recurring maintenance cost, shared across all books in the system. However, open sourced, community maintained programs are readily available, along with proprietary commercial offerings with paid support.

I know that the difference between raw web site and EPUB is some OEBPS metadata and a ZIP program. The difference between EPUB and iBook is a conversion program maintained by Apple. The difference between EPUB and Kindle is a conversion program maintained by Amazon. The difference between EPUB and PDF is hairier technically, but conceptually it's just non-reflowable fixed page sizes and fonts, which are theoretically handled by CSS "@media print" directives. The difference between PDF and print depends on the printer, but for self-publishing it's mainly just getting the page margins correct between the digital and print PDF versions.

Testing is a branding issue, not a technical burden. You don't actually have to test Adobe Digital Editions support, if you warn people on download that some EPUB readers are not fully compliant with the EPUB spec, and therefore will not render correctly. It's the IE6 problem all over again. If you support only the readers that are currently popular, there is no incentive for their maintainers to move any closer to a standard that would make maintenance easier for you in the long run. You provide the book, not the reading experience. That is the responsibility of the reader.

Mainly, I'm just pissed that they axed EPUB, but still do iBook and Kindle. That is implicitly supporting closed, proprietary formats (or embraced and extended formats) rather than open standards. We have already been there once.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#57

Post by wowtip »

logfromblammo wrote: post #56
dougmccune wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to do it and made an intentional decision to stop. They say it’s because it was costly. You come along and say they’re lying (meanwhile acknowledging the testing burden). I don’t get it. You think this non-profit, dedicated to the widespread distribution of their content, has some unspoken nefarious reason to deny you ePub versions?

I am unsatisfied with their explanation for discontinuing EPUB. "Too costly" is a subjective judgment, and they did not reveal the objective measurements or methods they used to reach it. A pack of gum is costly if you already spent all your money on something else. With the knowledge of what they do continue to support, I suspect that some of the costs they are paying for maintenance are the result of poor architect…

> Mainly, I'm just pissed that they axed EPUB, but still do iBook and Kindle. That is implicitly supporting closed, proprietary formats (or embraced and extended formats) rather than open standards. We have already been there once.

Yes, exactly, that was my reason for asking to begin with.

But I can buy into their explanation that amazon/iapples are much more downloaded as the number of devices are probably a couple of magnitudes larger.

But still sad a project with "open" in it's name mainly seem to support proprietary formats.

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