The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction.

Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.

Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.

Big fan of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and the accompanying lectures (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/537/Spring2018/Disc...).

Free, high quality learning materials like this are an absolute treasure, and without them, I wouldn't be where I am in my career today.

The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free.

I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.

There need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good.

Two notable efforts:

- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

- https://www.motionmountain.net/

as well as arguably the influential: https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

of course, in addition to crowd-sourced efforts at more traditional media:

- https://www.gutenberg.org/

- https://librivox.org/

- https://standardebooks.org/

- https://www.wikibooks.org/

as well as an entire category of Computer Science texts/programs published as books:

- http://literateprogramming.com/

- https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

I recall a university in canada had professors w=usi g their textbooks they authored but each edition was exxactly the same but they would change the quiz/assignment or exam questions so you had to buy it

on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it

its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it

then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear

it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now

Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point

I've much respect for the Russian trend of Samizdat/Libgen/Shadow Libraries

Textbooks being expensive has nothing to do with the textbook. The textbook as an actual object of learning is irrelevant; a textbook is just a fee added on to the cost of the class that happens to come with a physical pile of bound paper that may or may not be useful. It's unfortunately a rather regressive fee that also generates a lot of landfill waste.

There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.

I remember when the university where I worked made a big show out of moving to online textbooks. It was supposed to reduce the cost, reduce the need to lug books around, save trees, any rationale you could think of was thrown into the mix.

In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money.

In fact printed books are still widely used.

They should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money.

And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.

I read this book cover to cover after purchasing it with money, despite it being free online, and loved it. I think it’s pretty clear that the author was in a position where they could afford to put this out there for free. But not everyone is and I think people should be compensated for their time and efforts if that’s what they want.

Introduction to Statistical Thinking (With R, Without Calculus) by Yakir is pretty cool.

https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msby/StatThink/

I tried writing a free textbook as an undergraduate. It's on quantum mechanics derived from first principles -- https://quantum.chaidhat.com -- hope you like it!

Hey, this guy taught me Operating Systems! He was a great lecturer despite his own preference for book learning :-)

"We required the students to buy the book"

This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.

Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.

Completely agree with the sentiment of the article.

Also Remzi is a fantastic teacher. Really enjoyed being in his lectures.

When I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also <wink-wink nudge-nudged> about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class".

I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.

It always annoyed me that I'm paying thousands of dollars for tuition, only to be forced to pay additional thousands for the university-specific version of a textbook.

I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder.

Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems.

Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course.

I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it.

ETA:

I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.

I've heard good things about openstax.

I've always wondered why this case hasn't been made more obviously.

Like, the entire point of a library is not "to provide a limited number of books."

OSTEP is genuinely one of the best OS resources out there. Hard to argue textbooks should be behind a paywall when the free version is this good.

considering anna's archive exists, they already are?

There are existing free textbook publishing organizations. From a satisfied consumer point of view: https://openintro.org/ and https://openstax.org/.

> I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student

The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.

Why can't students buy one and then make like 20 copies?

Soon AI should be good enough to create a correct textbook.

“Everything except what I do should be free to me.”

Remember that you can make your own textbook (and accompanying materials) using your own money and time whenever you want!

Buying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and booksellers have an incestuous relationship with education institutions and aggressively extract pounds of loan debt flesh from the student body.

Everything should be free. The people writing the textbooks should spend 5 years of their life working on it for free.