The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

dyauspitr

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

newer_vienna

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.

oinoom

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.

chaidhat

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!

steele

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.

otras

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.

helterskelter

I've heard good things about openstax.

EliRivers

"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.

Xotic007

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.

CM30

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.

geor9e

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

amdsn

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.

agentifysh

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

nosioptar

Introduction to Statistical Thinking (With R, Without Calculus) by Yakir is pretty cool. https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msby/StatThink/

Vaslo

“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!

pvnk

Completely agree with the sentiment of the article. Also Remzi is a fantastic teacher. Really enjoyed being in his lectures.

NooneAtAll3

considering anna's archive exists, they already are?

SoftTalker

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.

eszed

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.

scotty79

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