As we all know, the very expensive textbooks you are required to buy in college are completely devoid of errors. And, each year the textbook is updated to include all the new and relevent error free data so that the student has the best that money can buy. Why do you folks here at TD have a problem with that? As WH has pointed out many times, you only get quality product if you pay out the ass for it. Everyone knows this is true. These freetards need to wake up.

I notice that the Flat World Knowledge books seem to be a set of textbooks for a business school curriculum, covering all the usual and standard topics such as accounting, finance, marketing, business communications, etc. I suppose that the business teaching community has a certain ideological commitment to business models. Obviously, they don’t share Wikipedia’s commitment to radical egalitarianism. But of course, as many people have noted, Open Source Software projects are not like Wikipedia either– they have editors, who make decisions about contributions.

Writing a textbook is simply a formalization of the work one does in teaching a course. One writes lecture notes to talk from, and, when rewritten, they become part of a textbook. Likewise, one prepares study questions and examination questions, etc. If you are competent to teach a course at the college level, you are competent to write a textbook for it, and many people simply pass out mimeographed hand-outs as full or partial replacements for standard textbooks, especially in small classes where the cost isn’t too important. A textbook is a much simpler proposition than an encyclopedia, because it does not pretend to universal knowledge.

There are lists of hundreds of free textbooks, mostly in science and mathematics. People just write textbooks to teach their own courses from, and generally have them printed up at the local copy shop, and eventually put the books on the internet. Academic scientists and mathematicians don’t pretend to be businessmen, and they generally aren’t very interested in business models. There is a certain minimum business involvement in getting paper copies of a book at economic prices, but sooner or later, a way around that will emerge.

Perhaps the students will become comfortable studying from computer screens. Textbooks can be redesigned around free educational software, so that the student reads a bit of text and then goes and plays with the software for a while, instead of trying to burn the text into his memory. The whole package of text and software can either be available on a website, or burned to CD-R disks at a cost of about ten cents each.

Perhaps printers will become better. Home computer printers are simply dreadful in a whole series of ways. If they were not dreadful, people could routinely use them to download and print off books. From an engineering standpoint, I’ve never been able to understand why printers have to be so dreadful. The manufacturer could surely build a print-head with redundant layers of nozzles, so that if one nozzle became clogged the print-head could automatically switch to another. The print-head could incorporate scanner elements to report what the print nozzles were actually doing, thus providing feedback. At this point, you can buy a gigabyte memory key in the drugstore for about ten dollars. It is hard to believe that the cost of a smart print-head would be prohibitive.

A curious thing about Weird Harold’s reflex response was that he assumed that everything had to be like rock music, that the motives of a textbook author had to approximate those of a rock star.

Previous post:

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070813/012132#c321

Also some additional sites:

http://www.opentextbook.org/

http://textbookrevolution.org/