Yep. Sorry for the late reply. I don't believe the two original authors are still here at CU. Though, you may contact Michael Main or Andrzej Ehrenfeucht with any concerns. They both have been around a while and are closest to theoretical CS.
The connexions site mentioned in the article is at http://cnx.org/ - I found it recently while looking up some maths, looks like some good stuff in there.
This is an area that needs to be hit big. & Not just prescribed textbooks, educational materials as a whole. The potential is enormous.
There is potential for $0 degrees. Maybe even free degrees. It's possible to acquire all the knowledge contained within a University degree on the 'outside'. That's not new but it's getting easier. But a framework for delivering the piece of paper, that would be something.
This is a 'dangerous' idea because education is a big equalizer and a huge boon to the meritocracy we all want. I've downloaded a lot of texts just for my own interests.
One other aspect is that I think we'll be seeing a change in education, where some people will be using the net to take classes their whole lives. There's so much I want to learn, but I'm not interested in another degree. I just want to know more.
That's brings up an interesting question. I have no doubt that the concept of universities as gatekeepers needs to go & that the time is ripe. Actually, they can stay on as gatekeepers but in the same way that American fraternities & such do, without pretending it's about education standards.
The question is if this should be achieved via some sort of widely available, low cost way of providing a widely recognised degree-like thing or by removing the need for a degree-like thing in altogether & replacing them with specific certification (like CPA) whenever it is necessary (a small fraction of those jobs employing mostly university graduates).
I actually don't understand how publishing houses still have control over this industry. With recreational/consumer books, authors need the publishers marketing machines. With textbooks,
- Many can just prescribe to their own students. 'Introduction to Economics' could sell 1k units a year in just one University.
- Authors are presumably already known/respected/wrote the previous version.
- Many academics prescribing the damn things freely admit that one doesn't differ too much from the other.
My Intermediate Micro professor suggested McAfee's book as a great resource that would tell us all we needed to know about economics, and do so quite rigorously...
... the week after he told us we'd have to buy $200 worth of dead-tree textbooks for the class.
I second that suggestion. I used McAfee's book last year for intermediate micro, and I found it far better at explaining the concepts than our mandatory textbook (by Waldman).
Waldman's book was certainly very colourful, but lacked some rigour IMO.
The biggest problem with this field is that most undergraduate-level teachers really don't have the passion required to research free replacements for the textbooks recommended to them by the publishers associated with the university.
I think students in each faculty should rally together and really push this point and work with the professors to find alternatives to 200$ textbooks..
The financial strain that textbook publishers place on students for profit inhibits the learning that their textbooks are supposed to stimulate... That's the big irony.
Anyone else find it odd that they didn't at least mention the effect of piracy on the market, especially after having a big piece on it a few weeks back?
My wife is in school now and it seems that the publisher uses a unique ISBN for each school the books are marketed to. This is to hamper inter-scholastic used book trading. Her accounting bundle of one text and one workbook were $190. Overall, she spent over $600 on textbooks we tried to find online and couldn't. And its not just that the books are expensive, but they aren't that great quality either. She is required to have the text and do problems from them, but for one of her classes, is getting more value out of a little $10 reference book than the $125 text book.
When I was in school some of the (mostly) foreign students got a nifty idea.
1.) Pool money together to buy the book.
2.) Photocopy it -- this is the tricky part. nowadays we can scan it. The students would take turns scanning in the book. photocopying it will cost $20 or so for a few hundred pages.
3.) Return the book and disperse money back to people in step 1
"... 1.) Pool money together to buy the book. 2.) Photocopy it -- this is the tricky part. nowadays we can scan it ..."
In most cases you didn't even have to buy the book, simply look it up in the library or class copies. Simply borrow the book and copy it. It was laborious and I didn't do this for all classes but some texts are simply not worth purchasing for the value they give. Others are priceless.
"... Reproduction rights? ... This is like someone else borrowing your code, copying it and using it himself or selling it to third parties without paying you. ..."
In an academic context where I learn from books that are hard to get, expensive and I only use small portions or where this is a secondary text? Now if I was using ideas from textbooks to make serious money then I'd probably purchase the book. Two completely different scenarios.
hardly, just that when new editions of the text we use in our classes get churned out so quickly, not that many places will have a recent enough version for us to use.
unless there's some sort of online version available..
i wish the big universities would kill these publishers
come on, harvard and stanford have like ten quadrillion dollar endowments and they get muscled by a thirty person publishing house in ohio??
i know the profs want to get paid. just pay them a flat fee of like $100k from their school's endowment and then release the book under CC license. the prof makes out because they get their money up front. the students win because they get cheaper books, quicker. the publishers die like vermin.
also some of these profs need a reality check. just like the musicians and actors...they are not a breed apart...if they want to gouge, they will need to deal with piracy.
most textbook authors don't make that much money from the text books they write. It's more of a prestige thing. Unless you're Serge Lang or Thomas Hungerford, I suppose...
