
The $9.99 Textbook - jasonlbaptiste
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/jason-l-baptiste-random-thoughts/999-textbook/
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bugs
I don't really want to see textbooks change that much, at least the good ones
that is in any aspect other than cost.

I have only used one electronic textbook and I found that paper books are much
easier to use in every way except for cost. Searching a electronic textbook
might be okay but I find indexes are very easy to use most of the time and the
rest of the time you aren't looking for the right thing.

On the subject of having facebook to help understand concepts I always find
that interaction on a face to face basis for learning is much quicker and if
you go to a large enough college it is relatively easy to find people in your
class out in the common area for help.

Some of my best books, like the Hibbeler books on statics, dynamics, and
mechanics of materials (<http://www.pearsonhighered.com/hibbeler/>), are very
good and were well worth the money I paid for them.

One thing that I hate about textbooks is that certain publishers have cornered
the market, at least in the engineering and math departments, and many schools
offer horrible textbooks that only the students notice because they are the
ones learning for the first time. A prime example of this is the publisher
Wiley, I have had books from this publisher from differential equations all
the way up to fluid dynamics that were just awful for anything other than
problems and basic concepts.

Edit: I have had a couple classes that were rather amazing on the textbook
stance, especially for engineering, that the teacher had a large enough
collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap
textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars, those books
always seem to provide good information and good quality that maybe a 9 dollar
digital textbook could work in that sense.

~~~
Sukotto
_the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were
able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for
around 20 dollars_

The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very
close to that.

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-
ran...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-rant.html)

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
this is what I think could be the answer/an alternative answer. I have a basic
theory:

"Anything you want to learn is accessible online via existing content or smart
people you can connect with. Someone just needs to organize it all"

The answer I usually get is something like, well, yeah Google, but that's a
pretty primary way to go about it. If you want to learn RoR for the first
time, you might pick up a book, but you'll probably scour the net utilizing
different sites. So why not organize the content that already exists into a
more structured manner that slightly resembles chapter ie- programming 101 go
here, setting up apache go here, learning about sessions go here, interacting
with MySQL go here, etc.

~~~
bugs
This (using the internet) is usually limited to things like programming and
lower level classes though, I can see an entire software engineering
curriculum being laid out with minimal references and books but I cannot see
any such thing for degrees in math, science (such as physics), engineering
(mechanical, electrical, civil), and so on.

Some things just need that extra bit that an established textbook can bring.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I've been trying to see if that's true or not. I still think any topic has
enough information/resources out there. When you say things like math+science,
are you referring to very advanced topics or simpler topics (or both) ie-
algebra, high school chemistry,etc.

~~~
bugs
Math is easy to find (to an extent): <http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/>

Other subjects are a bit more difficult and scattered, for physics
hyperphysics does well

But I am indeed talking about advanced topics which are available in abundance
for computer science and programming on the internet but when it comes down to
it that is the extent which the internet provides (except maybe graduate
papers, but that is usually too high a level to matter)

Say for example you wanted to learn thermodynamics with only the internet and
a teacher. You can gain a large amount of theoretical knowledge from the
teacher but without a book it will be hard for you to find examples on
when/how to use integral and differential energy and entropy balances (Thermo
might be a subject just on the boundary of finding information on the internet
and having to buy a book).

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gkoberger
Having worked at a company that made both Kindle and printed books, here's
something to think about- if someone can make a Kindle book for $9.99 (and
this seems low, even for a book, let alone a text book), they can make a
printed book for $19.99.

The problem isn't that books are printed on paper- paper is cheap.

If teachers contributed to and utilized wikibooks.org (or similar services),
we could have free textbooks (or, low cost, if you choose to buy/print them-
and, there are services that will let you print wikimedia wikis).

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I'm curious why wikibooks hasn't taken off like it should. I don't know if the
content isn't engaging enough or if the formatting is off.

~~~
shrughes
Wikibooks doesn't reward the authors at all. Wikibooks doesn't pay them money,
it doesn't put their name on their work, and it doesn't let their contribution
last forever -- others can go and muck it up with their editing. (If anything
I've said here is wrong, then let's say it's the perception of these problems
that is the problem.)

Also, the current books aren't particularly good and the syntax for editing
them is arcane.

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gnosis
Project Gutenberg, Flickr, and Wikipedia (to cite just three examples... there
are _many_ more) don't pay their contributers money. On Wikipedia
contributions can be mucked with by others. Yet these sites are all wildly
successful.

~~~
coryrc
Short articles on a specific topic require little coordination among
contributors. A book used for class can't have redundant sections. Each part
needs to build upon the previous sections (for math, anyway). The book should
have a consistent style.

Anyway, that's what khanacademy.org is for.

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ibsulon
Counterexample: What about a reader? These are common both in literature and
the social sciences, but the best example is a collection of short stories.

In a reader, the editor must pay each one of these authors something. In a
juvinile reader, count on 30 stories. (source:
[http://activities.macmillanmh.com/reading/treasures/stories/...](http://activities.macmillanmh.com/reading/treasures/stories/storylist/41.html)
as an example.) On top of that, there are questions, extra resources, and
accompanying teacher material to write. And you're going to be able to pay for
all this in 7 bucks?

Perhaps if we limit this to single/dual author textbooks, we can start talking
about it. It could be an interesting disruptive system when it comes to
tenure, for sure. (Without the curated system, academia will have to adapt.)

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
this relates to my thoughts in one of the comments below:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076436>

Why not just curate links and existing content for learning something?

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shrughes
The price is not that important. In a wealthy western nation, $100 for a
textbook is quite reasonable, if you're spending any amount of time reading
it. Compare that to the price of a lecture.

Ebooks mainly give incremental improvements. The one big improvement is
searchability. I suppose search on Google books now suffices.

Even if we count that, the benefit of e-books is marginal. Getting incremental
patches is nice in certain fields -- those that change a lot over a decade.
The patching of errata is generally useful though. Having comments on
textbooks would be, well, I don't know if that would be useful. That sort of
thing tends to produce a lot of pedantic comments or other comments on stuff
the reader shouldn't be distracted by. Consider the comments on the PHP
documentation. So much of it is wrong. It's the sort of thing that would
require moderation, so I suppose reader->author communication would be the
path. But what author wants to spend time on that?

Also, it's better for communities to develop around a piece of subject matter
than a particular ebook sold in a particular format -- these can include
different textbooks at the same time, can include people who get dead-tree
textbooks, and can include discussion that extends beyond what textbooks talk
about. It doesn't really make sense for a textbook to come with a forum
attached.

I think the trouble with all these ideas is that they all worsen the signal-
to-noise ratio. The nicest part about e-book textbooks is the low price and
open market. Looking back at my past, it seems the biggest inefficiency in my
learning was in deciding what to learn, not how I learned it. I think that
problem should be what we want to tackle the most (and $9.99 might help quite
a bit there, since people can then get a cheap taste of the material).

~~~
yummyfajitas
The price is unreasonable, because no one would pay that price if given the
choice.

The only reason textbooks cost $100 is due to agency costs: the person
choosing the textbook is not the person paying for it.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
yup, that's why textbooks are a broken economic model. If the quality is good,
a professor would certainly choose a far less expensive book. Many of my
professors usually suggest how to get the book cheaper.

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robryan
I do like the idea of the PHP documentation style comments, high quality
reviewed comments that add to the text.

Maybe the answer is open text books. Schools most of the time, especially in
K-12 wouldn't think about writing there own text book, but the combined power
of teachers all over the world could surely produce texts that are far better
than what we have today and I think a lot of teachers would contribute if it
was just some pages here and there on things they were passionate about and
the school sponsored them.

Sure you could still do limited publishing runs of this resource for people
who would rather have a physical copy but it would mainly live online.

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makmanalp
It's nice that this came up, since I'll be doing research on it for school for
the next 3 terms. It seems that there are several reasons for slow change:

* What do you do with all the middlemen (publisher's work, logistics) that are made redundant? Fire them?

* There is a theory saying that people perceive e-books to have lower value than printed ones because it's not touchable / feelable (I don't agree with this)

* Authors like to have everything else (proofreading and publicity are two major ones) taken care of by their publishers.

* Publishers are also a mark of status, like scientific journals. Getting a deal with, say, Oreilly automatically sets the author apart.

* Students are pretty much locked in to the books that their instructors choose and so textbook publishers take advantage of this fixed audience that is guaranteed to buy the books no matter what. Making it cheaper would be a loss to them.

There are many others I can't think of off the top of my head but this seems
to be the gist of it.

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ippisl
One big improvement in educational content i can think of , is the addition of
personalized content, that fits to your learning style.It seem to really
improve learning.

Of course this fits very well to computerized platforms , and works nicely
with 70% revenue share. This could be a much stronger disruption of the text
book market.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
can you give me an example/explain further?

~~~
ippisl
"""Guaranteach is powered by a vast library of short video math tutorials and
a sophisticated array of learning algorithms which allows the software to
intelligently guide a student at their own pace, and on their own customized
path through the math curriculum. As the software learns about each student’s
preferences for teaching styles, it selects the optimal tutor and video to
maximize the chance of the student understanding the concept. If you’re
struggling with the concept of differentiation from first principles –
Guaranteach has tens of short (1-2 minute) math tutorials on the concept, all
created by different teachers, with their own unique explanations, diagrams
and methods for conveying the concept. Search for the one you want, or let
Guaranteach recommend what’s best for you."""

<http://www.guaranteach.com/welcome/about>

I see no reason for this idea to be applied for higher education , and for
written content.

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teeja
Since facts can't be copyrighted, and texts have plenty of facts that don't
change much between generations, cheap texts in fundamentals could certainly
be produced _if_ professionals are hired to update the facts every few years.

Texts are dinosaur delivery systems for info. They leave the pretty-much
untouched question of individualized computer-assisted learning wide-open ...
a field which hasn't begun to emerge but most certainly will. The recent Khan
Academy post here <http://www.khanacademy.org/> is one pointer to a different
future.

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shrughes
Check out that toolbar!

Sorry, but I couldn't concentrate on the article, there was popup advertising
from the website telling me how awesome it was and it was too distracting.

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jasonlbaptiste
im thinking of taking that off. it was cool at first+people used it, but now
it doesn't really add anything.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
update: gone and way much better. Thank you for the feedback.

