Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks | Hacker News Reader

Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks

saylor.org

97 pointsOpen-Juicer25 comments

I think this is a great idea.

I lectured at a college for a few years. One class I lectured for was an intro class with 500+ students a trimester. The Course Admin wrote the text and seemed to update it often. I had seen the different versions. The updates were minor and the text was still out of date by at least 10 years.

The only way to change the text was to get a different Course Admin.

Sadly, there seems to be a lot of money to be made by professors requiring their text books in college.

Rather than Saylor decide on what to buy and at what price, I wonder if they could use a kickstarter-like model. If they matched individual donations, they could make their money go further & get some genuine measure of community support/interest in different texts.

I don't know if I am as gung ho about this idea as others are. The difference between the best analysis book (i.e. Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis) and the average analysis book is so significant as to justify the far higher bounty required to move baby Rudin into the creative commons.

I think you have a good point. OTOH, Rudin isn't really an example of the problem these people are trying to solve.

Yes, Rudin is good and worth the money. The students who buy it usually know this, and often plan on keeping the book for the rest of their lives.

The real problem is that huge numbers of people have to buy a brand-spankin'-new college algebra text for $180, and then can't sell it back at the end of the semester, since the department has decided to change to a different text. A free, quality text would benefit these people greatly.

(Meanwhile, the low price for a used 2nd-ed. Rudin on Amazon today is $25 including shipping.)

This sounds like a wonderful project. There's honestly no reason that this couldn't take off for most lower-level undergraduate classes. It would certainly kill off a large portion of the textbook publishing business, but they needed to die anyway.

Great idea.

Our body of scientific knowledge deserves to be both free (beer & speech) and open to all. There shouldn't be a significant cost to access it (apart from the education level).

Our aim should be build our global, connected society on the basis of free, open and life long education.

Sure this takes some capital cost to start. But the benefits could be massive: comparable to those realised when patents were first introduced. By freeing knowledge from its artificial shackles we'll enable a whole generation of advancement in the application of our science. Where there's a will, we will provide the way.

It makes me think that people such as Bill Gates and William S. Dietrich II could do worse than to fund this sort of project and its obvious complement (a proper, free-distribution alternative to the academic publishers).

How cool. $20,000 per text is much more than most textbook authors are claiming they are getting from the publishers.

Linear Algebra seems to be missing in the mathematics section of the list of eligible courses. I'd have thought it would be pretty fundamental. Hefferon's text is under the GPL and might be eligible.

I can recommend the Samizdat website [1]. They have a very good linear algebra book as well.

[1] http://samizdat.mines.edu/

This really shows the problem with this model. Textbook publishers have been very successful at attracting the top authorities in their respective fields to write the textbook. Sure, anyone can rehash what's already written in any other textbook. But can Saylor get someone like Halmos or Axler to write their linear algebra textbook?

Just because you're the top authority in the field it doesn't mean you're good at teaching it. Writing effective textbooks is a skill in it's own right.

Seems like Flat World Knowledge would be a great place for them to start if they're looking for free CC-BY-NC-SA textbooks.

http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog/disciplines

Disclosure: I did a summer internship there, everyone is awesome and I loved it.

Thank you for passing on the information about our Open Textbook Challenge, and for the support in this comment stream! To address a few of the questions regarding eligible classes: Saylor.org is building 200+ courses that are drawn from twelve high-enrollment majors at traditional U.S. Colleges. We have textbooks for some of these classes, but are looking for texts for the remaining classes. Our aim for this challenge is that these texts can be utilized for free by educators and students around the world.

We're aiming to expand our offerings in the future, so there may be a future opportunity to submit a text for a course not listed on the site. Please stay tuned for future announcements!

For any issues with the submission form or any specific questions about the challenge or eligibility, please feel free to send an email to OTC@saylor.org.

Thanks again!

Is there any chance you could publish financials (% which goes to G&A, etc.) for the charity directly on the website, where you solicit donations?

Great idea. They should offer smaller bounties for texts that don't meet the criteria, but would with some work, proportionate to how much work needs to be done. Though it seems that just evaluating them requires considerable effort.

Their submission form is ridiculous.

http://www.saylor.org/otc-form/

I was going to submit this: http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg_Jan_2011.pdf

An excellent (imo) book on introductory assembly and computer organization, but I'm not going to write out their "course mapping forms" and send in my resume just to submit it.

They can't be serious.

The form is clearly aimed at authors and that book's copyright clearly makes it ineligible. They're asking for free ("as in freedom") textbooks, not for people to upload pdfs of ebooks that they know of.

The copyright explicitly says it can be republished.

Also, you realize it's from a California State edu address, right? It isn't just some random e-book.

It can be republished only provided no charge is made. They want a book that the author owns the rights to, and is willing to put out under CC-BY.

Just because something has a liberal licence, doesn't mean it's compatible with other liberal licences. This ebook, for example, would not be considered FOSS (it couldn't be put in Debian, for example).

How would you rather prefer submission?

* If it's only for authors, the form should clearly state that at the beginning. Not just loosely imply it by using the phrase "your textbook," which could easily mean one that the reader owns or uses.

* There should be a link to a form where regular visitors (non-authors) can submit books. It would be more appropriate for their staff to follow-up with authors anyway at that point, once given the leads.

Based on your scenario and if this was successful, wouldn't the incentive/money for authors to write new textbooks be removed?

Jumping through the hoops for a chance of $20,000 doesn’t sound enticing. Certainly, the amount won’t be enough incentive to spend several years to write a new book. They might get some really old books or more recent ones that have gone nowhere (otherwise they wouldn’t be available).

What if the students decide which books to buy? Make a voting website where students votes for the material they need and can't afford, and Saylor buys it.

After reading the title I really wanted it to be:

"Sailor (pirate) offers millions of dollars in booties for opened textbooks"

Am I the only one?

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