The Case for Free Online Books (2014)(from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com) |
The Case for Free Online Books (2014)(from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com) |
It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find.
To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out.
I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition.
At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around.
There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book.
When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated.
The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise.
One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.
Remember that you can make your own textbook (and accompanying materials) using your own money and time whenever you want!
For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.
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. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.
Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.
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.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
Free, high quality learning materials like this are an absolute treasure, and without them, I wouldn't be where I am in my career today.
I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.
Wikibooks exists to allow people to collaboratively write textbooks, so every professor doesn't have to write the entire book https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it
its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it
then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear
it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now
Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point
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 traditional media:
as well as an entire category of Computer Science texts/programs published as books:
- http://literateprogramming.com/
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.
In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money.
In fact printed books are still widely used.
And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.
This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.
In those cases, we would run to the library first thing to get the books. If you missed out, someone would give you the PDF.
Professors would email the reading list before the first class with their recommendations, and even tell the students which libraries had each book. Other professors would have their notes and handbooks available on the website, and have some of the copy shops sell them for the cost of printing.
Also Remzi is a fantastic teacher. Really enjoyed being in his lectures.
I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.
I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder.
Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems.
Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course.
I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it.
ETA:
I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.
Hell, their math books are better than the paid books I used.
Like, the entire point of a library is not "to provide a limited number of books."
> I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student
The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.
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, on reflection, I'm not asking about historical arguments; though they may be interesting, I'm curious about what's relevant in the time of social media and LLMs.
I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought.
In regards to countries with weaker copyright enforcement, I think there's a bit of an inversion. Most countries that fail to properly enforce copyright do so due to a lot of structural issues, which also hamper creative thinking for independent reasons. China would be an example of a country with weaker copyright enforcement but also with good infrastructure, and it seems to be overtaking (if it already didn't) the US in terms of creative production (both for copyright and patents).
Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?
I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.
I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.
That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which cannot be sold, but only licensed.”
> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
Also from [0]
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.