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

The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 87 posts

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#71

Post by Someone1234 »

jrm4 wrote: post #63
Someone1234 wrote: post #48

The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction. Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publ…

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers. You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia. Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?

Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.

Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#72

Post by autoexec »

jrm4 wrote: post #63
Someone1234 wrote: post #48

The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction. Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publ…

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers. You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia. Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#73

Post by newer_vienna »

jancsika wrote: post #67
newer_vienna wrote: post #4

Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.

> the quality and quantity of published work will increase. I know the argument from the late 1700s that having copyright wouldn't necessarily lead to higher quality works of literature, music, etc. But I've never heard the argument that getting rid of copyright would actually lead to higher quality published works. What's the evidence or even reasoning for that claim here in 2026? Edit: added here in 2026 because, o…

Any work worth consuming must be a labor of love. Current copyright prohibits people who love newer works from building off of them. I certainly would still advocate for strong anti-fraud laws (you can't claim a work as your own if it's copied or derivative, but you could still distribute or edit it or build off it with attribution). But if an idea or piece of art is worth sharing with the world, it is worth building upon, discussing, sharing, and editing by anyone else who is inspired by it.

In 2026, environments with loose copyright enforcement (social media, online artists, video creation, remixers/editors, etc) are seeing a wealth of creative output. Promising artists who are not independently wealthy are supported from the bottom up (patreon, merch sales) and/or the top down (commissions, sponsorships), and they are happy if people share their work because compensation does work outside the traditional copyright-controlled distribution channels.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#74

Post by nosioptar »

helterskelter wrote: post #65
nosioptar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used several of their books in school. Each of them was top notch. Hell, their math books are better than the paid books I used.

I'm glad to hear that, I just ordered their astronomy book the other day! The online/PDF material looked good but I hate diving into something unless it's on paper.

I've seen a couple printed books from them. They all seemed to be a pretty good quality print.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#75

Post by yorwba »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
yorwba wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a st…

At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used. > All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them…

Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#76

Post by rahimnathwani »

jrm4 wrote: post #63
Someone1234 wrote: post #48

The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction. Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publ…

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers. You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia. Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.

Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.

The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.

That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.

Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#77

Post by ninalanyon »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #14
newer_vienna wrote: post #4

Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.

Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.

My relativity professor W. G. V. Rosser wrote a textbook on special relativity (An Introduction to The Theory of Relativity) which I very much doubt paid him back enough in royalties to compensate him for the time it took to write and also to issue revised editions.

It seems unlikely to me that he ever bothered to think about copyright

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#78

Post by bell-cot »

RobotToaster wrote: post #41
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.

Copyright didn't exist when Shakespeare was alive, clearly there was no incentive for him to write.

Disagree:

- In Shakespeare's day, the physical ordeal of setting type, printing, binding, etc. were a non-trivial moat against copying of printed works. Not so now.

- Shakespeare was closely associated with London theaters and companies of actors. Selling tickets for performances (of plays he'd written) was a far better way to make money than trying to sell scripts.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#79

Post by WillAdams »

WillAdams wrote: post #58

There need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good. Two notable efforts: - https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... - https://www.motionmountain.net/ as well as arguably the influential: https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ of course, in addition to crowd-sourced efforts at more tradit…

The think link should be:

https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkPython/

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#80

Post by jrm4 »

yorwba wrote: post #66
jrm4 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers. You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia. Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a st…

I've taught about 10 or 12 different courses. I only have one course in which I require a textbook, and it can be found for about 20 bucks.
Post reply on HN