

Saylor offers  millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks - Open-Juicer
http://www.saylor.org/otc/

======
ericHosick
I think this is a great idea.

I lectured at a college for a few years. One class I lectured for was an intro
class with 500+ students a trimester. The Course Admin wrote the text and
seemed to update it often. I had seen the different versions. The updates were
minor and the text was still out of date by at least 10 years.

The only way to change the text was to get a different Course Admin.

Sadly, there seems to be a lot of money to be made by professors requiring
their text books in college.

------
john_horton
Rather than Saylor decide on what to buy and at what price, I wonder if they
could use a kickstarter-like model. If they matched individual donations, they
could make their money go further & get some genuine measure of community
support/interest in different texts.

------
CesareBorgia
I don't know if I am as gung ho about this idea as others are. The difference
between the _best_ analysis book (i.e. Rudin's Principles of Mathematical
Analysis) and the _average_ analysis book is so significant as to justify the
far higher bounty required to move baby Rudin into the creative commons.

~~~
ggchappell
I think you have a good point. OTOH, Rudin isn't really an example of the
problem these people are trying to solve.

Yes, Rudin _is_ good and worth the money. The students who buy it usually know
this, and often plan on keeping the book for the rest of their lives.

The real problem is that huge numbers of people have to buy a brand-
spankin'-new college algebra text for $180, and then can't sell it back at the
end of the semester, since the department has decided to change to a different
text. A free, quality text would benefit these people greatly.

(Meanwhile, the low price for a used 2nd-ed. Rudin on Amazon today is $25
including shipping.)

------
w1ntermute
This sounds like a wonderful project. There's honestly no reason that this
couldn't take off for most lower-level undergraduate classes. It would
certainly kill off a large portion of the textbook publishing business, but
they needed to die anyway.

------
radicalbyte
Great idea.

Our body of scientific knowledge deserves to be both free (beer & speech) and
open to all. There shouldn't be a significant cost to access it (apart from
the education level).

Our aim should be build our global, connected society on the basis of free,
open and life long education.

Sure this takes some capital cost to start. But the benefits could be massive:
comparable to those realised when patents were first introduced. By freeing
knowledge from its artificial shackles we'll enable a whole generation of
advancement in the application of our science. Where there's a will, we will
provide the way.

It makes me think that people such as Bill Gates and William S. Dietrich II
could do worse than to fund this sort of project and its obvious complement (a
proper, free-distribution alternative to the academic publishers).

------
bugsy
How cool. $20,000 per text is much more than most textbook authors are
claiming they are getting from the publishers.

------
plinkplonk
Linear Algebra seems to be missing in the mathematics section of the list of
eligible courses. I'd have thought it would be pretty fundamental. Hefferon's
text is under the GPL and might be eligible.

~~~
wedesoft
I can recommend the Samizdat website [1]. They have a very good linear algebra
book as well.

[1] <http://samizdat.mines.edu/>

~~~
wwwwrrrr
This really shows the problem with this model. Textbook publishers have been
very successful at attracting the top authorities in their respective fields
to write the textbook. Sure, anyone can rehash what's already written in any
other textbook. But can Saylor get someone like Halmos or Axler to write their
linear algebra textbook?

~~~
ig1
Just because you're the top authority in the field it doesn't mean you're good
at teaching it. Writing effective textbooks is a skill in it's own right.

------
ryana
Seems like Flat World Knowledge would be a great place for them to start if
they're looking for free CC-BY-NC-SA textbooks.

<http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog/disciplines>

Disclosure: I did a summer internship there, everyone is awesome and I loved
it.

------
CamieAtSaylor
Thank you for passing on the information about our Open Textbook Challenge,
and for the support in this comment stream! To address a few of the questions
regarding eligible classes: Saylor.org is building 200+ courses that are drawn
from twelve high-enrollment majors at traditional U.S. Colleges. We have
textbooks for some of these classes, but are looking for texts for the
remaining classes. Our aim for this challenge is that these texts can be
utilized for free by educators and students around the world.

We're aiming to expand our offerings in the future, so there may be a future
opportunity to submit a text for a course not listed on the site. Please stay
tuned for future announcements!

For any issues with the submission form or any specific questions about the
challenge or eligibility, please feel free to send an email to OTC@saylor.org.

Thanks again!

~~~
rdl
Is there any chance you could publish financials (% which goes to G&A, etc.)
for the charity directly on the website, where you solicit donations?

------
nrkn
Great idea. They should offer smaller bounties for texts that don't meet the
criteria, but would with some work, proportionate to how much work needs to be
done. Though it seems that just evaluating them requires considerable effort.

------
puredemo
Their submission form is ridiculous.

<http://www.saylor.org/otc-form/>

I was going to submit this:
<http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg_Jan_2011.pdf>

An excellent (imo) book on introductory assembly and computer organization,
but I'm not going to write out their "course mapping forms" and send in my
resume just to submit it.

They can't be serious.

~~~
calpaterson
The form is clearly aimed at authors and that book's copyright clearly makes
it ineligible. They're asking for free ("as in freedom") textbooks, not for
people to upload pdfs of ebooks that they know of.

~~~
puredemo
The copyright explicitly says it can be republished.

Also, you realize it's from a California State edu address, right? It isn't
just some random e-book.

~~~
calpaterson
It can be republished only provided no charge is made. They want a book that
the author owns the rights to, and is willing to put out under CC-BY.

Just because something has a liberal licence, doesn't mean it's compatible
with other liberal licences. This ebook, for example, would not be considered
FOSS (it couldn't be put in Debian, for example).

------
pixcavator
Jumping through the hoops for a chance of $20,000 doesn’t sound enticing.
Certainly, the amount won’t be enough incentive to spend several years to
write a new book. They might get some really old books or more recent ones
that have gone nowhere (otherwise they wouldn’t be available).

------
csomar
What if the students decide which books to buy? Make a voting website where
students votes for the material they need and can't afford, and Saylor buys
it.

------
JimmyOdom
After reading the title I really wanted it to be:

"Sailor (pirate) offers millions of dollars in booties for opened textbooks"

Am I the only one?

