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Open Textbook Initiative

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Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#21

Post by ajsnigrutin »

dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

In slovenian (tech) colleges, years ago most of the books were written by professors, and published directly by in-college publishers, so calculated to current prices, books cost 10-20eur (literally depending on thickness and size), and were resold and reused for many years. Even photocopied versions were available at a few photocopied places around, due to a size difference (A4 book shrinked down to two A4 pages, side by side on one landscape A4 page), and noone cared, not even the authors.

Checking the situation now, some are even available online, eg:

http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf

Some are even unchanged from my times: https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02... (1999)

Basically, noone really cares.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#22

Post by bradstewart »

somenameforme wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down. At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically th…

Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent, and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when they did occur so you could continue using older versions

These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#23

Post by viovanov »

dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

Reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about how math textbooks were evaluated by the Curriculum Commission.

"The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#24

Post by mavhc »

chrisseaton wrote: post #17
dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

In the UK we (or at least I) never used the exercises from the text books - the lecturer sets their own questions and exercises. So the exact page layout of the text books doesn't matter, and you can use any edition. In general text books just seem to be less of a big deal in the UK. I remember reading all the classic text books, but the course didn't revolve around them. You could often pick which text books to read…

I was never required to buy a textbook in uk for maths/physics, my biology friends had to buy 1 large textbook, that was it

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#25

Post by malauxyeux »

chrisseaton wrote: post #20
jccalhoun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well good news: they don't bring out new versions as often any more for most subjects. Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if the…

What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries where you can borrow these text books?

They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of students.

At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID.

I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies.

edit: an extra word

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#26

Post by chrisseaton »

malauxyeux wrote: post #25
chrisseaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries where you can borrow these text books?

They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of students. At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID. I never knew anyone who got into troubl…

It's weird because they know how many students they have, they know the text books needed before the course starts, they have a library, seems like the library should provide them.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#27

Post by dzdt »

somenameforme wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down. At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically th…

In my experience the professor-authored books are not the same story. Professors teach one or two sections and earn a few dollars per book (author share on technical books is small!). Their main optimisation using the book they wrote is reduced preparation time to teach as they know that version inside and out.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#28

Post by jccalhoun »

chrisseaton wrote: post #20
jccalhoun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well good news: they don't bring out new versions as often any more for most subjects. Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if the…

What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries where you can borrow these text books?

They will generally have one on reserve that you can only check out for something like 4 hours or something.

My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#29

Post by dkarl »

bradstewart wrote: post #22
somenameforme wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down. At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically th…

Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent, and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when they did occur so you could continue using older versions These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.

That was my experience, too. Opposing the racket was a reason that a couple of my professors wrote their own textbooks. Only a few did that, but a lot more wrote and distributed their own problem sets so that students could use any edition of the assigned textbook, or even a different textbook if they had one from another school.

Re: Open Textbook Initiative

#30

Post by bachmeier »

somenameforme wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #5

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down. At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically th…

> Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student.

This is not completely true. I have long avoided using any textbooks the students have to pay to access. The only exception currently is my intermediate macroeconomics class. I have not found a suitable no-cost supplement that covers all the topics of the class. My motivation is that it's easier to teach a class if you can offload certain topics to a reference, and you can't do that unless everyone has access to said reference.

Beyond all that, universities have an incentive to reduce cost as much as possible. Whether university administrators ignore that incentive is left for the reader to determine.

My employer offers small grants to support the creation of open teaching materials: https://lib.k-state.edu/services-support/scholarly-communica...

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