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Comment by gaetgu | Hacker News Reader

I’ve just come here to say that while I am sure that these are useful in some way to someone, they are really bad textbooks. I would rather cough up the ~$250 for a calculus textbook than use the OpenStax one. I know that the rest of my class felt this way and if you read the Amazon reviews similar sentiments (see: I want to buy a copy just to burn it) are stated.

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I have different observations. I am a polish high school student and I've been using openstax physics for college for a long time. Maybe the reason is that textbooks in Poland are very poor, but I use openstax in studying to final exams and competitions, and so far, they served me well. Foreign textbooks are so much better.

> Foreign textbooks are so much better

It is amazing how much better English textbooks tend to be compared to the textbooks in my country as well.

If you look up the review scores on Amazon, they mostly get 4+ stars. Other interest might be in play. This is a direct challenge to the textbook rent seeking behavior by some professors, e.g. write new edition each year to destroy the second hand market, use digital logins for exercise materials and so on.

I've used them. They're pretty comparable to the average textbook. Maybe a few more typos than some 31st edition (which fixes a few typos and swaps the order of a few common homework questions so you can't buy the last edition) but it's ... fine.

There's some textbooks that have more personality. But the OpenStax books are pretty much the same as any other mainstream book (the kind that are assigned to most classes).

Maybe the calculus class was just boring? The textbook is there as a baseline to cover the derivations, example problems, and how to do them. I can think of plenty of reasons why a calculus class is just boring (too hard, too easy, or it's taught in a boring way).

Being this disproportionately negative makes me think you have an interest in keeping the expensive-textbook business model from being disrupted.

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