I remember that chapter from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman quite well. One of my favorite passages is the following, which is the source of the title of the chapter:
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by
the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."
Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"
"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain
that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet.
There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the
publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers,
and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and
hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third
one would be late."
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They
couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the
rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The
fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
My guess is that some day students will use e-readers to view books that are created under the Creative Commons license. When will that day come? Not soon enough...
Two things are required for this to happen:
1)There has to be a Mark Shuttleworth of text book collaboration.
2)e-readers need to have color, be 8x10 and some what cheap.
Part II is basically done. Any successful founders want to do part 1?
The big problem is getting people with credentials to write the books. School systems have to worry about that sort of stuff, and usually these people want a good chunk of $$$ to participate in the long process of creating a textbook.
