
Textbooks Prices: Out of Control - aaronbrethorst
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/03/textbooks-prices-out-of-control-and.html
======
bsilvereagle
I think this article glosses over one of the key factors of the corruption in
the textbook industry. Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties
off the cover price. Then when new editions come out to block out the used
market, the price on average increases 12%.

Those same professors dictate which books students buy. Students are NOT the
consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. At many large American
universities a board of professors pick the books for the large Chemistry,
Biology, Physics classes. If one of the board members has written or
contributed to a book, you know that is the book that will be assigned to
1000+ students a semester. At near $200 a piece and assuming a 30% royalty
that professor just made himself $60,000 at ONE university. Now imagine his
book being used at 10+ universities.

No matter how great the open textbook world gets, professors who have the
option to net $60K are not going to select those books which gain them
nothing. Once again, students are not the consumer of the textbook industry.

One aside on new editions. I have a 2nd edition of a book, the 7th edition,
and the 12th edition. The only thing that changes is the problems at the end
of the chapters. The text on each page is near identical. The problem as a
student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many
cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.

~~~
lebek
I'd be interested to know the proportion of professors that write textbooks
used in their own courses. I expect it's quite small. Certainly more common in
humanities, quite rare in science and engineering.

~~~
bradyd
During my freshman year at Georgia Tech I had two classes with text books
written by the instructor. My chemistry teacher was one of the authors of
textbook we used. The other was my CS1311 class, but instead of a traditional
textbook it had a plastic comb binding and was really inexpensive compared to
my other books (I actually still have it sitting on my shelf - $17.50).

Edit: Now that I look more closely at it that CS book was just a supplement to
the actual textbook, which was written by the instructor.

------
jedanbik
The prices may be out of control, but as a student, it was surely a delight to
find that I could buy $8.00 chemistry books from the likes of Amazon and
Abebooks and sell them to the Barnes and Noble on campus for a reliable $65.00
cash until they met their quotas.

~~~
jzelinskie
A buddy of mine was speaking with his professor during office hours and
watched someone buy a stack of books from him for $500. That stack of books
was given to the professor for free by a salesman in hopes that he integrate
it with the curriculum and make sales for the publisher.

------
jccalhoun
I'm just a grad student in the humanities but my experience as the instructor
of courses has been nothing like the one described in this post. I don't know
anyone in our department that has ever been called by a textbook rep let alone
taken out for lunch. Hell, there have been a couple times when I couldn't even
get them to send me a copy of the book I'm teaching.

I also haven't had any choice in what version of the book I use. I've had the
bookstore call me and tell me that there is a new edition and they won't order
the old edition so i have to use the new edition or some other book entirely.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"I've had the bookstore call me and tell me that there is a new edition and
they won't order the old edition"

Eh? How does a single phone call from a single bookshop prevent you from
assigning a particular edition of a particular book for your students?

Are you in a remote location in a country without an Amazon or Abebooks
equivalent?

This is not meant as snark. I honestly don't get it, and would like to
understand the background to the situation you describe.

~~~
sliverstorm
I believe there are often old rules from when there was no Amazon (which
wasn't that long ago). Fifteen years ago if your teacher assigned a book that
could not be had at the bookstore... where would two hundred students find a
copy?

~~~
rahimnathwani
"where would two hundred students find a copy?"

They would buy them from one of the 400 students who studied the same course
over the previous 2 years.

In the current universe, older students are stuck with textbooks they no
longer need, whilst younger students are worried about buying these same
textbooks lest they miss out on some required content.

I bought a used copy of 'Intermediate Microeconomics (2nd edition)' from an
older student when I arrived at university, for less than half the price of
the newer 3rd edition, which had been published that year. The book was much
cheaper then, so I saved only a few pounds, but the current 8th edition costs
over 150USD.

I'm not sure how the content of a first or second course in microeconomics has
changed over the last 20 years, but a used copy of the 3rd edition can now be
had for less than 10USD.

------
jimhefferon
I am the author of a text that has been Freely available for some time now so
I've read this post with interest. I'm seeing responses both here and on the
Reddit post saying things like, "If I was in charge I'd make the class
professors staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit." I
appreciate the sentiment, but developing a text is a _great deal_ of work. For
instance, in math developing a set of quality exercises is, in my estimation,
2/3 of the effort, so just putting beamer slides in a comb binding is nowhere
near enough.

At least part of the issue lies in the reward system. Lesson One of economics
is that people do what they are rewarded for doing and at this point most
faculty would not get professional credit for being part of an open text
development effort (obviously the situation now with printed texts is that
people get money, and obviously also people do things for a variety of reasons
but generally ..). Since a quality text takes hundreds of hours of close work
by experts, you can't be surprised that quality open texts are not thick on
the ground. (I'm fortunate in that my institution has been willing to
recognize my work in this, but such generosity and foresight is not common.)

So it is not as simple, at least in math, as making an edict.

~~~
ivan_ah
> _staple together some pages and make a free text, dammit [...] a quality
> text takes hundreds of hours of close work by experts_

I totally agree that a meaningful text can't be created _a la carte_ by mixing
disparate sections written in different styles, and covering concepts
differently. The value provided by the author is not just writing the words
but choosing the order or presentation, carefully foreshadowing concepts in
earlier chapters which will be presented in later chapters, and using spaced
repetition in later chapters to review and solidify core ideas from the
beginning.

That being said, I think texts can be pretty modular if written with
modularity in mind by the same (or a few) authors. For example, I was able to
reuse the "intro to high school math" sections from my first book on math and
physics in the followup book on linear algebra.

<on topic plug>We at ([http://minireference.com](http://minireference.com))
are building an apt-learn command for first-year textbooks. Get in touch if
you want to write the Bo bullshit guide to chemistry and/or biology.</plug>

------
beloch
I would have loved to have digital copies of all my textbooks on a tablet in
university so I didn't have to haul 20 kilos of books around all the time. One
has to wonder how many university students look at the prices being charged
these days, download illegal pdf's online, and then go to the bar to drown
their guilty consciences.

~~~
LordIllidan
You're assuming that we feel guilty about it!

------
Theodores
Exactly why this situation persists in the age of the WWW is a mystery to me.
I could understand expensive course specific texts back in the day, but,
nowadays?

If I was the boss at a university I would make all teaching staff put all of
the content needed to teach their course material online in some wiki of
sorts, with credits for researchers and undergraduates if they can add to that
body of knowledge. In fact I would make it so that PhD. thesii didn't just sit
on some shelf unread, such works would have to go into the body of knowledge
created. Within one year something tangible could be created. Clearly it would
not be possible to upload those 'Harry Potter' books studied by Media Studies
stoodentz, however, for anything science there should be no need to run into
copyright problems.

With such a system any graduate that had maintained pages or added notable
content could put the links on their CV for an employer to read.

This could be a fully virtuous circle with better students rather than
necessarily wealthier students attracted to the university. From those
students there would not be an outflow of money to the textbook-scam-artists
(or to the posh restaurants where they wine and dine teaching staff).

The business of a university is to teach, not to sell text books.

~~~
ronaldx
> If I was the boss at a university I would make all teaching staff put all of
> the content needed to teach their course material online in some wiki of
> sorts, with credits for researchers and undergraduates if they can add to
> that body of knowledge.

You should understand that you're probably asking for a significant change in
contract conditions which gives you Intellectual Property rights over your
employee's work.

By saying "in some wiki of sorts", you mean that the university would gain the
right of distribution in the way that they (commercially) see fit, rather than
the author being able to use their own work. Requiring that the work is
uploaded in a particular format will also cause untold headaches.

My employer insisted that I sign a contract like this (giving up my IP), I
refused because it would have caused problems with my other work (I literally
could not consider it), and I ended up quitting over this.

Textbook authors are generally not scammers. They are people trying to make a
living from their expertise - expertise both in their subject and in their
ability to communicate, which are skills otherwise undervalued by society.
Your beef is with the publishers, not with the content creators who you are
punishing here.

~~~
rahimnathwani
In many other lines of work, employee contracts _do_ give the employer IP
rights over employees' work. If I write software as part of my work, for which
my employer pays me, they get to decide how to treat the IP. Many employment
contracts go further, and include IP created outside work but during the term
of employment. Some jurisdictions make this more strong transfer
invalid/unenforceable.

Why does the current system exist as you suggest? I mean, why do teaching
employment contracts allow employees to retain IP they create in the course of
their employment?

~~~
_delirium
A bit tied up with the IP issue (and maybe a bigger one) is how time
accounting works: anything you are required to do as part of teaching your
courses, such as actually teaching them and preparing materials for them, must
generally be budgeted as "teaching time". This must usually be paid by the
institution's own budget (not by grants), and the % teaching time is also a
headline figure people use to compare job offers. Things _not_ part of the
official teaching duties generally fall into either "research time" (perform
experiments, write papers & books, present results) or "service" (serve on
committees, review papers, etc.).

Currently writing textbooks is classified as "research", considered entirely
the professor's own initiative, and therefore done either as part of a regular
year's research time, or during a sabbatical (which is a period of 100%
research time). If you reclassified textbook writing to be part of "teaching",
i.e. your official teaching duties when assigned to teach a course involve not
only teaching the course but also writing a textbook for it, you'd need to
budget sufficient time to write the book into the teaching budget. This would
typically require either reducing the number of courses the professor teaches
per semester, or increasing the % of their time which is budgeted as teaching.
Institutions are generally reluctant to do either of those, for a mixture of
budgetary reasons (teaching is usually paid internally) and recruiting reasons
(if you have an 80% teaching load at your university, you will have trouble
recruiting researchers who have offers from 50%-teaching-load institutions, or
from corporate research labs).

~~~
rahimnathwani
'preparing materials for them, must generally be budgeted as "teaching time".
This must usually be paid by the institution's own budget (not by grants)'

So, do teaching materials prepared during 'teaching time' become the IP of the
employer?

------
omnibrain
He forgets to mention the point that there are usually "international
editions" of all textbooks that are sold for half the price or even less. And
they are not only sold in developing countries but in virtually every market
that is not north america. Coincidentally searching for them on Amazon.com
even directly via the ISBN usually leads no results. I remember reading an
article where publishers used copyright law against reimporters of such
editions.

~~~
jeza
In Australia textbooks typically cost $100-150 a title so I'm guessing that is
on par with America. I've also been able to source these international
editions at a fraction of the price by purchasing online. However, tech books
from the likes of O'Reilly can easily cost 2-3 times as much here, putting
them in the same league as textbooks.

I found it amusing when we had a representative from a publisher speak at the
first lecture for a subject. He had a slide saying "buy locally" and was
encouraging students to buy his ebook which was twice the price of the
international edition I had already purchased but marginally cheaper than his
print edition.

The end result is that students are not buying textbooks anymore and those
that do are importing them from overseas. The independent co-operative
bookshop at my university went out of business last year as a result. The
university opened their own bookshop with ridiculously high prices as well,
but minimal staffing from what I could tell. I don't think they can sustain
the high prices in the long term without the whole thing falling in a heap.

------
bbosh
Is it necessary to buy books? At my university (in the UK), they have lots of
copies of textbooks in the library. And if there's a book they do not have,
you can ask them to buy it and they most probably will.

~~~
suhailpatel
Same for my university in the UK (most of our prestigious universities pride
themselves with the quality of their libraries). I think it's more a case that
there are only a single/few copies of each required reading book in the
library and on loan, others miss out.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, this generally works for small courses but not large ones. The library
can often come up with 10 copies of a book, but probably not 500 copies. It's
how many grad students (who are usually in smaller courses or seminars) get
their books, but undergraduates usually have to buy, borrow, or download their
own copy, especially in the core classes that everyone is taking.

------
gambiting
I literally don't understand the concept of buying textbooks. I have just
finished a 4-year Master course in Computing Science in the UK and never had
to buy a single book. Every single book that was on the reading list had to be
available from the library - the library had at least 50-60 copies,and then
you could access the ebook free of charge through the university network. I
know that it's the same for other courses at that university - Maths, History,
Biology, Electrical Engineering.....thinking of it now, I can't recall a
single person who bought a textbook, ever. And in the case when I needed
access to some academic publications for my dissertation and our library
didn't have access to them, I filled out a request and within a week they
purchased all the books that I needed. Was our university unique in this
regard, or is that entire textbook craze US-only?

~~~
glomph
That is certainly not the case everywhere in the UK. Many humanities
departments cannot afford to have enough copies of all the set texts.

Also many Science departments insist on the newest editions of books which the
library will not stock past one or two reference copies.

Most university libraries will get you books on request, but that often
doesn't cover set texts (they will ask you to wait for the reference copy).

------
pandler
The part that vexed me the most as a student was the constant release of
marginally different textbook editions. The one time I tried my luck with an
older (and cheaper) edition was with a thermodynamics text that was only one
edition out of date. The actual chapter text was almost identical, but the
differences in exercise problems and corresponding look-up tables meant I
ended up having to borrow other students' books on a regular basis.

~~~
bsilvereagle
I'm amazed the steam tables had different values. The author had already paid
a lot of money to use Company A's tables, I have no idea why they would then
switch to Company B's tables.

------
mindslight
Back when I was in school, I had a plan to photograph (the quality was good
enough) the pages of all my intro textbooks, burn them to a CD, and distribute
a few copies in the freshman honors dorm before the term started (I figured
they'd be more accepting of a weird format, and enterprising with recopying
the cds). I never quite got around to it though, as the scanning took too
long. It's too bad, even then it was obvious that the textbook market was a
scam based on changing page/problem numbers so you'd feel behind or unable to
do homework if you had a different edition.

For most books, you should hold off buying as long as possible as the class
might not actually even use them. Some you may only need for homework
problems, which you can usually borrow from a friend in class. If the prices
have really gotten this out of hand, students should just start forming their
own sharing/copying groups and make that the accepted norm. Let the publishers
reap what they've sown and extract their pound of flesh exactly _once_.

------
gergles
Really, textbooks aren't that big of a deal. There's other sources to get
textbooks.

The bigger problems, IMO, are "homework systems" or "virtual labs" where you
are required to pay a superfluous charge to a textbook publisher because
professors are too lazy to grade homework. So you either buy a brand new copy
of your intro algebra book for $130 and get a 'free' "MyMathLab" code, or you
can just buy the code for $115. (e.g.:
[http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/MyMathLab-
St...](http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/MyMathLab-Standalone-
Access-Card-4E/9780321199911.page))

You'll note at that point, they don't need to produce a new edition every year
that renumbers the problem set, because they're going to get their pound of
flesh anyway, and you can buy an old book - but you still won't be able to
pass the course, because professors require you do the homework through this
'system'.

~~~
j2kun
I'd say this is not as big a deal as textbooks, because you need textbooks
long after you're done with the introductory courses that use these systems.
For example, I have a few dozen textbooks on my shelf costing well over a
thousand dollars in total, but after four years of undergrad I can count maybe
three times I needed to pay to enroll in an online homework system, for a
total of what, maybe $300?

------
Beltiras
Some professors in the Uni I attended are enlightened and use open textbooks.
One thou amazed me. He taught Discreet Math. He had every edition of the book
for the last 10 years and told us to bring any one of them. He had a map for
the homework shuffle between editions and alerted us to the little changes
made in the text itself. Gem of a teacher.

------
fekberg
Perks of self-publishing is that I can decide the price of my book myself. I
believe that more people will buy my book if it is cheaper and hopefully
everyone will like the book and tell their friends that this book is both good
and cheap. It's a win win.

I can price my book so that when someone buys it, after taxes and all that I
can at least buy myself a coffee while working on the next project. I see it
as a "Thank you for helping me, here's a coffee".

I understand that books from larger publishing houses are more expensive
because there are more people that needs a coffee to some extent there's just
too large of a margin or too many coffees that needs to be handed out.

Based on how many copies I've sold from self-publishing I've been able to get
myself more than a coffee, but the individuals that bought the book didn't
have to suffer too much economically as I don't price the book in the range of
a new mobile phone.

------
ivan_ah
On the topic of free textbooks, I recently bought the _OpenIntro to
Statistics._ For just $10, I received a soft-cover full-color 300pp textbook
on statistics. I found the price to be simply amazing so I had to get a copy:
[http://www.openintro.org/stat/](http://www.openintro.org/stat/)

------
rikacomet
In India, one of the reasons that most college textbooks cost $2-$5 on
average, is that the colleges refer books that are reasonably priced (of
course with content).

Why would someone buy for example _Product Design and Development 5th Edition_
which costs approx 190$ ?

In West, it is a recommended book in most colleges. But in India, it is not
the book our teacher/college refers to as the main content.

By 'main content' I mean that even though on average 5-6 books are recommended
reads but most teachers have read 1-2 books thoroughly, and others slightly
for non-repetitive reasons.

PS: I have read the above mentioned book in a library, its totally NOT worthy
of that price.

~~~
eitally
The other reason is that a lot of the problem described here exists solely in
the US market. Many publishers offer international editions, or even Indian
domestic market editions, of the same books at drastically reduced prices.
Searching for these has been one of the primary methods US students have been
trying to save money the past few years.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/education/29textbooks.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/education/29textbooks.html)

[http://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-
editio...](http://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-
editions.shtml)

[http://www.quora.com/Why-are-textbooks-so-expensive-in-
Weste...](http://www.quora.com/Why-are-textbooks-so-expensive-in-Western-
countries-while-the-same-books-are-cheap-in-the-Indian-subcontinent)

------
abc123xyz
There is a site out there on the underweb, which I will not name, that sells 1
million ebooks for $0.01 and another million at 1/20th the list prices (so a
$100 text book for $5). The pirates as always are well ahead.

~~~
christiangenco
I can't find it in 30 seconds of googling. Can you give us a better hint as to
what it's called?

------
ryderm
I'm about to graduate from a US college, and I've never paid for a text book.
Very few classes use them for more than supplementary reading or for homework
problems. With a combination of learning things online, recorded lectures,
finding PDFs of them online, borrowing from a friend, and checking them out
from the library, it's been easy to not buy them. I don't think I've actually
done either of the last two, which brings up the question: are they even
needed? Personally, I think they are largely useless with the wealth of
information that is available online.

~~~
aet
Prices of text books go up when people rip off the authors, editors and
publishers by downloading PDFs.

~~~
kchoudhu
Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the authors, editors and publishers brought this
upon themselves?

------
ibrad
I hope you succeed. When I was in school, I spent some semesters piggy backing
over my classmates because I couldn't afford the $239 book. I did buy a 2
editions behind book for $30 only to find out that some of the home work were
numbered differently or missing.

~~~
christiangenco
I'd love to see a repository of problems from the back of textbooks. I think
there's some law in education that says that you can copy <10% of a book and
legally distribute it.

~~~
ivan_ah
That's an AWESOME idea.

Does anyone have experience with the 10% copyright rule?

Even more interestingly---students could peer review their solutions to the
problems.

~~~
christiangenco
Here's a link on the 10% rule I found: [http://www.complexip.com/ten-percent-
is-fair-use-for-educati...](http://www.complexip.com/ten-percent-is-fair-use-
for-educational-institutions-copyright-owners-disappointed/)

------
jostmey
Perhaps the open-source model may be used to draft new textbooks. Free
textbooks for the world containing up to date information. Call it
WikiTextBooks?

------
pserwylo
I'm genuinely astounded that there is not more of a movement towards open
source style text books, that accept contributions (e.g. chapters) from
reputable academics from around the world.

I understand that there is a huge amount of money involved, but surely the
only stakeholders who benefit are:

1) The publishers, for obvious reasons

2) The authors, as they may get a healthy sum of money for writing a given
text book.

3) (possibly) the teachers, if they get bribed into using a particular book in
their curriculum.

Lets forget about the publishers, because they are for-profit businesses who
do not have the students best interest at heart. We'll also forget about the
teachers, because this type of bribing is not common in my experience
(teachers I know tend to go for what they already know, rather than the new
shiny book which came to them in the mail). Also, we can presume that teachers
are not in the business of squeezing every last dollar out of their students.

As for the authors, I don't have an issue with people making money by writing
text books. I know a few academics and industry people who are able to pursue
more interesting goals because they have money coming in from books they've
written. BUT THIS IS THE TINY MINORITY. Of all of the academics who would be
capable of writing a chapter for, e.g. an introductory programming book, I
would randomly estimate that only 0.1% of them have written a text book that
is used in universities. If another 5% of them got together and contributed to
an open source text book on the topic, that was liberally licensed and free
for students to obtain and distribute, then why should we not embrace that?

I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough for
doing such things [0]. However, surely just doing it for the good of education
and teaching is motive enough?

Every now and again I see books come up on hacker news which seem like quite
good resources (recently it was a cryptography book, another time it was a
link to a github repo for a specific field of mathematics). It would be great
if these projects could take off, and become the bibles for their relevant
areas. And if a particular academic institution disagrees with the teaching of
the book, don't go out and prescribe expensive text books to your students.
Rather, fork the (e.g. CC-licensed) book that they are not happy with, and
change it. Or better yet, submit a pull request, discuss the issues with the
maintainers, and hopefully resolve the issue amicably.

It just astounds me that this is not a thing.

[0] - This occurs a lot in discussions about how companies such as Google try
to get artwork from people at zero cost, citing that the artist will get
"exposure".

~~~
mjn
> that accept contributions (e.g. chapters) from reputable academics from
> around the world.

As someone currently doing something like that, I'd say it massively
complicates the process of getting a coherent book finished this decade. The
first issue is that people never deliver their chapters on time! Everyone's
busy, and it's like herding cats to get a bunch of well-known people to
deliver a manuscript, which is usually not the most pressing thing on their
TODO list. (I'm guilty of it also.) The second issue is that if you want it to
be a coherent textbook, vs. more of a collection-of-tutorials style anthology,
everyone has to be on the same page about the overall approach the textbook is
taking, and the chapters have to fit together closely. This is particularly
important when later material builds on earlier material, and needs to do so
in a way that works pedagogically (as is almost always the case in a CS
textbook). Which requires a lot more Skype meetings and usually iteration on
the chapters.

In our case we tackled it by having three primary "in-house" authors, at the
same institution, who decided on the overall approach of the textbook, and
outlined the whole thing. At least one of us was then also a co-author on
every chapter; external contributors were invited within this context, to
write part of a chapter in collaboration with us. This helped integrate the
external contributions a bit more easily, and made sure they fit in to the
book. And we had only about 8 external contributors. I would definitely _not_
want to go all the way to having completely separate chapters written by
different people and try to integrate them, and get the book finished before
2020.

The short version is: it's a good idea, but integrating multiple people's
contributions into a coherent textbook is hard. If you take 10 people, and
take 1 chapter each from the textbook they would've each written if they were
writing the whole thing, the most likely result is not a coherent textbook,
but 10 chapters that don't really fit together. Not just in the sense that
you'd word things a bit differently, but that you'd organize the book
completely differently and emphasize completely different material, so the
result doesn't introduce material in a progression that's useful to a reader
trying to learn the subject.

~~~
pserwylo
Firstly, thanks for doing what you're doing. Even if it is a hassle to get it
all together, I hope that the more people engaging in this type of effort can
only be a good thing.

I agree that the coherency of the text book would be poor if everything was
written by different authors. In fact, it is often so jarring when I read a
journal article with different writing styles, that it is one of the easiest
ways for me to identify plagiarism in student work or when reviewing for
journals.

I guess the answer would be to have particularly committed and experienced
editors like you mentioned in your attempt.

Perhaps if the book started of as quite a basic book, with key concepts,
written by one person. Then, over time, that person (or small group of people)
could accept pull requests from the community, and modify them to fit the
style of the original book.

This could work quite similarly to most open source software projects:

1) Start of with one or a few people

2) Build only enough functionality for a working/useful piece of software

3) Over time, build up functionality via community contributions (and further
contributions from the original contributors)

4) The direction of the project is steered by a group of people with its best
interest in heart

Note how in the example of software, there is a fully working thing (even if
it doesn't have all the bells and whistles attached) quite early in the
process. Also, the overall vision for the project is kept in line by the
original maintainer, who runs an eye over each pull requests and is free to
make suggestions for changes. If there is any major disagreements, people from
the community are free to fork the software and make it suit their needs.

I don't know how practical this is, in that a text book without huge amounts
of detail may have less usefullness than a piece of software without huge
amounts of functionality. Perhaps there are some fields which would benefit
from such an approach, while others really do need to have a comprehensive,
"finished" book to be of any use to anyone.

~~~
ivan_ah
> _a basic book, with key concepts, written by one person [...] without huge
> amounts of detail_

For math and physics you can get pretty far with definitions and key formulas.
As for succinctness of the explanations, it all depends of the "level of
description" for the coverage. The more math notation used, the shorter the
text will be, but also less readable.

In addition to the notation, you must control the vocabulary and the level of
abstraction which you use in the narrative. The language level in advanced
math textbooks is level="grad student", most science textbooks assume
level="some college", most science news articles are level="high school",
general media assume level=middle school", except Fox and CNN who give
primary-school-level explanations of World politics.

In my experience, writing explanations for the "some college"-level readers
can be quite succinct so I think your idea of a pared-down minimum viable
textbook is possible. For example, a short intro to machine learning could
start from 100pp of short-form lecture notes that explains the basic ideas and
formulas, solved example problems and maybe some code---godda have some code
in there if it's about ML. Writing such a text is just 6 months of work,
whereas writing a full ML book would take years. Once the basic notation,
definitions, and math prerequisites are written down, there could be 20-30
separate applications chapters (10-30pp each) where a single idea of ML is
described by someone knowledgeable about it (perhaps not a researcher, the
best would be a grad student). Bonus points for complete code examples. Pull
requests for typo-fixes and requests for additional explanations ensue. And
Bam!, ML textbook v1.0 done. A textbook in a year.

(v2.0 one year later can add more applications, add applications of the
applications, or additional introductory material (tutorials) to make the book
more accessible.)

> _it is often so jarring when I read a journal article with different writing
> styles,_

I think this will be and important problem with book-collab projects... How do
you meld the voices (and egos!) of 30 people in a single narrative?

> _I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough
> for doing such things. However, surely just doing it for the good of
> education and teaching is motive enough?_

I presume you must be under 30 from your statement since: _Anyone who is under
30, and is not a leftist, has no heart; and anyone who is over 30, and is not
a capitalist, has no brains._
([http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed))

There must be some sort of monetary incentive. Maybe "book writing" funding
from fed-gov or prov/state-govs? Maybe paid by universities? Either way there
must be money involved if we want to motivate people to invest one year of
full time work to write a book on subject X. Making money of the printing
seems like the best choice to me... and, interestingly, charging for printing
is totally compatible with GFDL.

I think print-on-demand and self-publishing is a good first start---it puts
more power in authors' and readers' hands, which are the only people that
matter in the value chain. It's going to get very interesting in the book
publishing sector in the coming years, I promise ;)

~~~
mjn
> _perhaps not a researcher, the best would be a grad student_

This reminds me of one of the other frequent failure points of having authors
each write a chapter: they write a chapter that is really more of a survey
paper about their favorite technique (maybe one they invented or have worked
on). Usually that ends up with a choice of content and writing style that's a
poor fit for a textbook. A grad student writing about something that is _not_
their own research might be a way of avoiding that.

I agree some kind of incentive is probably needed. It could be monetary, could
be advancement-based, depends on the people writing and their situation. On
the other hand, money might help for both: if there were grants for textbook
writing, which e.g. a professor could use to buy out some of their own
teaching and pay their summer salary, it'd also help out with the angle of "if
I spend a year writing this book instead of journal articles, will I still get
[tenure | full professor | etc.]?", because getting grant money is usually
counted as a plus for advancement.

There are some areas that have stronger internal incentives, mostly those in
which there is significant controversy, and people have strong opinions about
the Right Way to do something. The belief that existing books were doing it
wrong and he could write one that introduced things correctly was what
motivated Robert Harper to write his 2012 programming languages textbook, for
example. Another variant of this is if there are _no_ textbooks on a subject
so far, and you feel it's as a result being overlooked: then writing a
textbook can be a form of evangelism for your new field. There is less
incentive to write a good textbook "for free" on established and
uncontroversial subjects.

------
untilHellbanned
have the students learn the stuff via the internet. ~$0.

