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I understand that "just write a book" might come off as glib, especially for profs who teach 3+ classes per semester. So I don't mean that everyone has to, or should, but

1. Writing 150 pages that are targeted for your class and your students is easier than writing "the bible" for your field.

2. The quality of the first draft might not be great, but if you are getting feedback and constantly improving, it's not long before you are better off than using one of the expensive tomes.

3. If you start with other free material, you can get off to a fast start (several people have now written books that started with my material, and then evolved beyond recognition).

This is too disaligned with the criteria that are important to having a successful career as a professor. The problem isn't doing the work, it's that it takes a lot of time and is generally not a priority for the university and department vs research.

I've had some professors create fully self-contained slide decks for their course with references. Other professors teaching the same course often shared slides. Occasionally a textbook emerges from this material, but not most of the time. I think this is an approximation of your idea and probably the closest we'll get in practice.

Edit: Okay, I see in another child comment that you are a CS professor — how do you make the time to do both?

That's true. I have the good fortune to work at a college (Olin College) that recognizes that my work developing textbooks is aligned with the mission of the institution, and can have as much external impact as research. But you are right -- most places give professors zero credit for writing textbooks.

We could use a few more schools that think like that!

Hey man,

Just wanted to thank you for all the stuff you have given us. I have found your books to be both delightful and enlightening, and the fact you give them away is pretty astounding. I myself buy the printed copies just to support this work, however I know many many people not of means that I point your resources to with great success.

I don't know if you hear it a lot or not enough, but thank you, sincerely. Solid material you got here.

Seconded, I have Green Tea Press bookmarked and I've been meaning to read through The Little Book of Semaphores for a couple months now

> there's no actual solution to that presented

I think you missed this part

> All of our books are available under free licenses that allow readers to copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material.

Along with the source to all the books, https://github.com/AllenDowney

We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen Downeys

> We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen Downeys

Well, as this reminds me of a discussion on here that illustrated why 'hopeless idealism' in the face of actual problems of market economics tends never to amount to much, the "answer" readily jumps to mind:

"Create a model for a market which rewards actors who behave similar to [Allen Downeys] and punishes those who do not, and migrate communities to instead use such a system."

Of course, it's a nontrivial (monumental, tbh) solution, but frankly, so is the problem it addresses - we'd have them solved if they weren't. Nonetheless, that is what is needed to 'solve' the problem (rather than merely sidestep it - though that could also be done as a non-lasting 'patch' solution).

Fortunately in this time of flux, few are confident in what "will" actually happen, and thus many are willing to try out new systems. Perhaps someone like you (or even you) will construct such a model in Ethereum or some other market platform which ends up being the dominant one in 20 years.

Fortunately, from first-hand experience, Allen is churning them out himself in the form of students. He's a truly amazing professor, so while not exact, the clones are effective.

Many of his students are even involved in education in some way (incl. me, I make software for university bookstores).

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

While this doesn't apply to every case, this certainly affected me as a university student:

1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.)

2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do an assigned problem set ("Read Chapter 3, do question 2, 3, 5, 7 on page 148" only applies in the latest edition).

3. Libraries often only have two or three copies of the textbook, and all the students want to access them at the same time (cramming the week before exams).

4. The university library has hours and closes at night.

5. Fewer people buying textbooks leads to textbook publishers increasing per-book costs to cover the fixed costs of a print run, leading to fewer people buying textbooks.

6. Different professors teaching the same course having different preferred textbooks. Both get listed on the course description, but you don't know which one you should buy until the first day of class.

Oh right, I think a big difference is that in American courses it seems that there is one course textbook, and the assignments are taken from that. Our courses weren't designed around a textbook.

For us, assignments (both problem sheets and essay questions) were written by our tutors. They came with a reading list that would include a selection of relevant articles, books, and textbooks, but there was no single one that you had to use.

UK redbrick graduate here. My courses mostly followed textbooks as well. The library usually had enough stock for 10% of the student body to have a copy at any one time.

Librarian here...many university libraries here actually have policies against purchasing textbooks.

The reason being, there is just not enough in the materials budgets to purchase textbooks for every class (especially considering that after a year, many will be "outdated" and need to be replaced) and still have enough money to purchase all the other necessary materials (mostly database subscriptions which cost an arm and a leg, but all the other books they need to purchase as well). However, practically speaking, we can often get copies of individual textbooks on an as-needed basis through interlibrary loan. Usually someone somewhere has a copy, but it's not a solution that can be applied on a university-wide level.

Often a professor will put a copy (that they own) on reserve so it may be used within the library, but those can't be checked out and taken home for use for the entire semester.

Personally, I think it's shameful we don't have a better solution, but that's the state of things here. Many schools are turning toward open educational resources (OER) but it's slow to adopt, because many professors have a favorite textbook and OER texts aren't always of the same quality as mainstream texts. It's a really frustrating situation.

> Many students already do this. It's not uncommon for students to not buy a single textbook in a semester.

I never bought a textbook unless I absolutely completely needed it. Otherwise I did anything possible to get it if I needed it before outright buying the book. In some cases just using Google was enough for the class. Especially for most of my programming courses. Textbooks are so expensive, and half of the time you don't even go through the whole of the book, not even getting your money's worth because the semester is not long enough for said book. Math textbooks were my only exception, though the school did allow me to borrow them for a few hours.

I had a different experience in school, I kept the text book and re-read it. Eventually I had read every text book that I kept (although I did not keep them all) at least once and some of them several times. In my "first" senior year I discovered it was really useful to re-read a text book about a year after I had finished the class, apparently a lot of stuff had settled out by then and since it wasn't coming at me all new at that point I found it really helped me deepen my understanding of the topic generally.

  >> re-read a text book about a year after I had finished the class...
  >> it really helped me deepen my understanding of the topic generally.

As an endorsement of this comment, 'ChuckMcM has the deepest/broadest knowledge of an enormous range of hardware/engineering issues of anyone I am familiar with who posts frequently on HN.

> I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented.

Several of my professors solved it by supporting the last couple editions of the book vs just the latest. Works for everyone.

I'd say about 2/3s of my professors in the 90s used huge copy packets you'd buy in addition to textbooks.

My wife got the same degrees 15-20 years later (finance/economics), her courses (at what's now ranked as a "higher" rated university) were the equivalent to what I had in high school.

This wouldn't really have been an issue but when she went to graduate school, it's on par (difficulty wise) with the 90s. So the gap she had to make up was extraordinary.

It's funny, because many of my professors already do write what amounts to a small textbook, in the form of notes/slides. These are then freely available online. By saving, editing, and expanding on these notes over the course of a few years, I'm sure most could have a fairly authoritative textbook for their course.