Free Books Part 2: Free Textbooks

Posted by tomo at 03:15 AM in education .

If you can go to college for $1200 a quarter for tuition but have to spend $300 on books, you've just increased the cost of education by 25%. Obviously, some people can afford to go to much more expensive schools but for how many potential students does this decide their ability to go to school? Who in the developing world would be able to afford American textbook prices? According to the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP), the State of California spends over $400m annually on textbooks. One wonders how much of our nation's non-labor annual cost of education is for buying books.

The Wikibooks project is hoping to solve the problem of expensive texts by providing an environment for people to easily and collaboratively create free and open textbooks (similar to the GNU project's goal for replacing Unix with a free version). One of the problems with writing a textbook, says Ben Crowell, is that it's so much work for one person and to do it for free requires dedication. Wikis make content generation fun and easy and one can contribute as little or as much as one wants at a time to an area in which they have expert knowledge. Another tedious task when writing textbooks is that they require so many problems and solution sets for each section. Someone may enjoy writing text but not enjoy coming up with problems, but with Wikibooks anybody could contribute by coming up with some problems. Often times students are forced to buy new editions of an expensive textbook only because the problem sets have been changed. We know that textbooks are a scam. Maybe once free textbooks replace traditional ones, there will still be a market for providing instructors with fresh new math problems and solutions.

However, free electronic textbooks aren't a panacea for affordable education. For one, they require computers, and many of America's public schools which can't afford new textbooks will have trouble affording computers. On the other hand, many colleges today require that their students have computer access, some even requiring laptops. For the developing world, where the cost of books is the most prohibitive, there is currently a Thinkcycle project set up to provides rural areas with a way to read digital compressed libraries, but obviously they will need the rights to use texts in this way and free books are important here.

With or without computers, it's still nice to have a print copy of the book because it weighs less and doesn't require power, but print-on-demand technology isn't as cheap as it could be and so printing out a book takes out a lot of the savings from having a free book. However, the reader can decide to only print out sections of a book instead of paying for and carrying around giant texts when only a chapter or two is needed from it. It's rare that all the material from any textbook is used in any class. Also, when changes are made to a text, it is possible to print out just the portions that have changed. Today, textbook publishers use these small changes to force students to buy new editions. Sometimes the only things that has changed in a new edition are the problem sets. Although not free, printing a textbook is still cheaper than purchasing from a publisher.

There is one other part important piece to freeing education. MIT's Opencourseware has gotten much positive press for putting some courseware online. While a step in the right direction, when one tries to actually use this course material a problem becomes apparent. Although lecture notes and syllabi are available, almost none of the referenced material is. A teacher in India can structure their course around an MIT course for free but are still stuck buying all the books and other texts that are needed for the course -- or the more likely case is that they can't afford to. Marrying Opencourseware with free textbooks could finally bring about affordable education to the masses. I really like instead what Rice University is doing with the Connexions Project, which offers up an array of college level courses where all the course material is right there in web format and available free and open (Creative Commons license). Unlike MIT's Opencourseware, you can browser through these courses and start learning right away and without having to purchase books and other referenced materials. Like Wikibooks, Connexions is a collaborative effort and it's not just Rice folks who are contributing. For example, EE 700: Digital Signal Processing at Ohio State has been contributed by Phil Schniter.

While we still don't have Diamond Age primers, I think this is a step in that direction in that it enables highly motivated people with access to one piece of technology to educate themselves.