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The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

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Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#81

Post by jrm4 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #76
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.

"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…

And the majority of people I work with DON'T.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#82

Post by casey2 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #2

Everything should be free. The people writing the textbooks should spend 5 years of their life working on it for free.

If someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#83

Post by rahimnathwani »

jrm4 wrote: post #81
rahimnathwani wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

And the majority of people I work with DON'T.

If that's the case, by what mechanism are publishers forcing your students to buy books with a single-use access code?

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#84

Post by spit2wind »

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.

I taught a remedial math class. There are thousands of books for such a topic. I was required by the university to use a specific new edition (something like 9th) from a specific publisher. I went to the university library and found the 2nd edition. The questions were more or less verbatim but in a different order. The lesson portions were more or less the same and tended to be better. I explicitly directed students to this edition, which they could purchase for something like 2$ (vs $150). In 10 years in post-highschool eduction, and 4 institutions, I never once heard or had a teacher do that. It's a choice and the majority of educators don't do it.

Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#85

Post by spwa4 »

WalterBright wrote: post #70
spwa4 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not choose different books? For most subjects, why not old books or wikibooks?

Because Calculus, Newtonian Mechanics, etc., has changed dramatically since 50 years ago. LOL.

You should probably add /s for sarcasm. It's not very obvious.

I think it's more "laziness" btw. My algebra professor at university was famous for buying a 500 page stack of printer paper the last day of the term, putting it on his desk so he'd be frustrated with it, and after a week or so start writing next year's course. You got bonus points for finding mistakes in it, but there weren't many. The calculus course was the same.

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#86

Post by dyauspitr »

free_bip wrote: post #8
vonneumannstan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?

Or they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.

And what, use the historically fabulously successful flat model?

Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

#87

Post by mna_ »

amdsn wrote: post #28

The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for fre…

Some more free ones:

Abstract Algebra by Judson - https://judsonbooks.org/abstract-algebra-theory-and-applicat...

Linear Algebra by Hefferon - https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/

Real Analysis by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/ra/

Differential Equations by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/

These should be enough to give you a first and second year undergrad level education in mathematics (minus stats&probability).

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