Open Textbook Initiative

In case you didn&#x27;t know:<p>American Institute of Mathematics is a research non-profit ran by one of the Fry brothers (of Fry Electronics).<p>At least until recently, it&#x27;s been run out of the back of the office space of their headquarters location on Brokaw road in San Jose.<p>Now that the store (and the company) is defunct, I&#x27;m happy to see that AIM is still kicking.<p>Can&#x27;t vouch for everything that they do, but they have been running pretty solid geometric group theory workshops on the reg. I got to attend one, and have good memories of it.<p>I&#x27;m still sad that the store has shut down. They cite COVID as a reason, but they&#x27;ve been in liquidation mode long before that (at some point, I couldn&#x27;t even get a USB flash drive there!). I hope that AIM will go on as a legacy.

As someone who&#x27;s never studied real math (only Physics math), I found the book &quot;Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications&quot; extremely interesting, in part because it leads you to understand asymmetric cryptography and error-correcting codes. Also the SAGE exercises are neat.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abstract.ups.edu&#x2F;aata&#x2F;aata-toc.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abstract.ups.edu&#x2F;aata&#x2F;aata-toc.html</a>

I&#x27;m just a lowly adjunct, but I sense that one barrier to open textbook adoption is the accreditation process. I don&#x27;t know exactly the connection, but I get the feeling that the department can check some box if they say that all their lower division calculus courses are taught with Pearson&#x27;s book, for instance. Sort of a &quot;no one ever got fired for choosing IBM&quot; type situation.<p>Anyone have any insight to this? I only have a sample size of two... which leads me to believe not all departments worry about this so much.<p>Edit: see these MAA guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;programs-and-communities&#x2F;professional-development&#x2F;committee-on-faculty-and-departments&#x2F;guidelines-for-undergrad-programs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;programs-and-communities&#x2F;professional-de...</a><p>One suggestion is &quot;there should be established procedures for periodic review of the curriculum... should include careful scrutiny of course syllabi, prerequisites, and textbooks.&quot;<p>As much as I hate to say it, there are legitimate reasons for carefully controlling the curricula in lower division courses. A big one is: transfer credit. People get pissed when it&#x27;s difficult to transfer their cheaper CC credits to a larger university.<p>The easiest way to solve these problems is by dictating curricula. But, unfortunately, the Pearson&#x27;s of the world feast on the resulting homogenized market.<p>This is similar to my problem with Common Core. Everything in Common Core is perfectly reasonable. But now we have one giant textbook market where Pearson dominates with their products which now bear a &quot;Common Core approved&quot; label on the cover.

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

Some mostly off-topic textbook stories:<p>My dad used to be dept chair at the college where he worked. Because of his title, textbook publishers would send him copies of their books for consideration. He would give them to me and I would sell them on half.com.<p>He was also able to order the answer books for my calculus textbook. I could do all the practice problems and look up the answers (not just the odd # questions which were in the back of the student book). At the end of the semester, I gave the answer book to the chair of the math dept to keep in the student math lab.<p>Also, one day in my physics class, some textbook sales reps came to demo this new RF remote with numbered buttons like a TV remote. Each student in class would get one. Their sales pitch was that it would allow our teacher to put a daily quiz up on the projector screen, and each student would use the remote to submit their answer, and then his TA wouldn&#x27;t have to grade 150 quizzes. Also it would track attendance (which I thought should be optional for college classes). Students were expected to pay for their own remote, and I think there was a license fee per semester. Yuck.

I worked for a higher-ed startup that was heavily involved in the textbook space for a little over 5 years. There are a myriad of factors that contribute to the high price of textbooks. Some of those factors are:<p>• The principle &#x2F; agent problem - Instructors naturally select the course materials for their own courses but typically never need to pay for their own instructor copies. In essence instructors are making decisions for which they generally bear no cost, but which do impact costs for students. Compounding this problem is that, surprisingly often, instructors did not actually know the cost of the materials they selected.<p>• The cost structure problem - Instructors will sometimes select a textbook to use for a course for only a year, but often they&#x27;ll use a textbook for longer than a year. Using the same textbook for two to three years for a course isn&#x27;t uncommon. This has implications re: how much revenue is at stake for a publisher for each textbook sale.<p>For example - if an instructor is teaching a particular course twice a year (once in the spring and once in the fall), and they use the same textbook for 2 years in a row, and each course has roughly 30 students - then a publisher selling an instructor on a $200 textbook has a value of:<p>4 courses * 30 students * $200 = $24,000<p>Or, roughly the cost of some cars. With this kind of revenue on the line for each sale it makes sense for publishers to develop a nation-wide, high touch, hands on, sales force. And a friendly, knowledgeable sales person can be more persuasive during the course materials selection process than a worthy (but distant) affordable textbook initiative that doesn&#x27;t have an in-person advocate.<p>• The content discovery problem - Part of the reason why publishers resort to sales teams is because they don&#x27;t really have any good alternatives. There isn&#x27;t a great platform for higher ed content discovery. Instructors who want to survey what content might be available for their course have a limited amount of time to make a decision, that decision has large consequences (their entire course might have to be redone for example), and there often isn&#x27;t very good info about higher ed content (what are the learning outcomes associated with this content? what is the resale value of this content for the student? what do other instructors think about this content? etc.).<p>• The transient pain problem - Most students complete their college education in 4 - 6 years, which means that (for most) the pain of high textbook prices is temporary. In other words - the pain is temporary for the cohort that would probably be most motivated to solve the problem.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstax.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstax.org&#x2F;</a> if you search for more open textbooks (OER = open educational resources) other than math.

Are there any major resources tracking all the open-source textbook type projects? I&#x27;ve seen some really cool stuff posted on HN like that Homopothy-Consistent Mathematics textbook.[0] AIoM&#x27;s OTI seems cool, but is limited in scope and OpenStax mostly makes their own textbooks so it also ends up limited in capacity<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kerodon.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kerodon.net&#x2F;</a>

Based off my shelf of old books, the price of a good, new, textbook has stayed roughly the same. The quality of the text and layout is much better now, but the paper is pretty much worse.<p>Some really boring old radar books I own, have the most beautiful silky paper that the equations practically glow, whereas now you get stuck with the toilet paper edition for not much less than what that old one would&#x27;ve cost.

Great initiative! I love it.<p>I&#x27;m trying to get people interested in developing a model for an open, digital, printable, free textbook, that anyone could access online, download, in full or in part, share, or print if necessary.<p>The general idea is to create dematerialized textbooks, organized in modules: an officially approved minimum basis, and additional optional modules. Redundancy would be allowed for easy adaptation to local needs. Learning and teaching communities could also make contributions.<p>Bundles could then be customized or made available in presets. Schools could have their own official bundles, and students could get them in print in libraries, online, and the digital versions would, of course, have open formats.<p>The best example is that of a Math textbook, that allows for direct translation, and which main contents never get old.<p>So, for example, LaTeX modules would be made available online, and compiled into one document as needed. Indexes would, of course, need to me made universal in some way. And bundles would get their own UID, for easy sharing.<p>Today, the available digital textbooks are heavily copyrighted walled gardens, and their licenses expire after some time, so they&#x27;re broken by design. But their contents are, for the most part, already Commons. So what gives?<p>When I started writing this comment, I had in mind that the Portuguese Ministry of Education had spent around 40 M€ buying textbooks from large publishers that are distributed for free to students in need, in a voucher system. While checking this, I found recent news reporting that this value, in the Portuguese national budget for 2019, had underestimated the cost by 100 M€ (and that year&#x27;s budget had a surplus of 0,2% of the GDP...). I expect that an annual sum this large would be more than enough to fund a long term project.

In my view, this can be part of the solution. The biggest issue is an incentive issue with tenure.<p>[1] Professors are critically punished for poor research, mildly punished for poor teaching<p>[2] A base level of teaching acumen is required. Improving teaching at all is costly, so teachers are willing to pay up to the opportunity cost of lost research impact for course materials<p>[3] So they systematize and outsource necessary non-core components -- course content, course grading (via TAs and PhD candidates), and where permissible test and homework creation and evaluation. Since they have no real impact to them for the costs involved, such as purchase of texts, they proceed forward purchasing into the racket<p>How to fix? Make teaching reviews (student and outside observer) factors for keeping tenure. Don&#x27;t include as part of tenure review beyond what is already there. This gives you the best of all worlds: world-class professors invested in quality teaching.

Great resource, thanks for sharing. As someone who wants to &quot;re-learn&quot; some college level math, this is invaluable.

The issue with the textbook market is that the people that pick them (departments, professors) don&#x27;t actually have to pay for it. If colleges were forced to subsidize even a small % of textbook costs, we&#x27;d see an order of magnitude reduction in prices.

Anybody read the Shoup one yet ? How is it ? I know as much about computational number theory as a chimp knows about computer science.

Thanks for posting this.