

Open Source Textbook Company Now BMOC At 400 Colleges - edw519
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/open-source-textbook-company-now-bmoc-at-400-colleges/

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ShabbyDoo
It is my understanding that most professors who author textbooks do so for
some combination of fame or altruism. Perhaps the author of a popular calculus
book (Stewart) might earn enough to justify his time, but professors writing
niche texts for upper-level courses likely earn minimum wage at best for their
efforts.

Thirty years ago, one had to work with a publisher because the technologies
required to create bound dead tree versions of your words were expensive and
labor intensive. Now, the marginal effort (beyond actually writing the book)
to make something look nice is fairly low. Wouldn't both fame and altruism be
maximized by producing a free, widely-available text?

Edit: Compared to research, writing text books doesn't help much with
obtaining tenure, does it?

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billswift
I understood that massively used lower level texts provided substantial income
to their authors, but I can't remember the source, it was some book I read
about a decade ago, and I could be wrong.

