Hacker News Reader

Comment by equark | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the fact that textbooks are written by people. They don't magically appear. Writing a good textbook requires the passion of a single expert author, who must dedicate years of his or her life to write it. There are very few shortcuts. And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them.

A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out leading textbooks at a premium and after holding an auction to determine the fair price. This gives you the best of both worlds -- rewards for individuals' efforts but the ability to use the published material in an unrestricted way in the future. Plus you avoid the loss associated with monopoly rights granted via copyright and wasted duplicative textbook efforts.

This ideas has been proposed more broadly for patents by Prof. Michael Kremer of Harvard. Its logic is pretty compelling:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2000/0...

View on HN

"Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

Engelhaupt, 31, was one of three district math teachers who spent about 100 hours each developing the lessons, which cost the district about $175,000 less than buying new textbooks."

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/anoka-hennepin...

here's the link to the book: http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/book/8561

My kids are in California. I assure you, the textbooks are reference standard awful. People magazine is more compelling.

I am entirely certain the average parent of a kid in our school would be able to turn out better material, to say nothing of all the professors and leading experts in California who would love to contribute directly to their kids' education.

The question in my mind is how to construct this. The law seems like a last resort. Maybe some YCers can work on this cracking this nut.

WikiTextbook. Adopt the Scholarpedia model where there is curation of particular topics. Put it under a Creative Commons license and make it easy to download.

High school textbooks are written by editors, dozens of content writers, and some "name" author who puts their name on it. University level textbooks are much better, of course.

Got a citation? If that's the case then it isn't the case world wide. My mother is the author of two reasonably successful high school textbooks and did all the writing, image selection, etc long before an editor gets their hands on it to polish.

> * And crowd-sourcing is definitely not one of them.*

I agree, but crowdsourcing would be handy for fixing errors or improving clarity. If a bunch of people highlight a passage that they think is confusing, and give reasons, that gives the author (or others) an opportunity to clarify.

Yes, that is something that teachers could be doing, but why not make the books as good as they could be?

This has been done. Real World Haskell [1] comes to mind.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/types-and-functions.ht...

That's a good article, thank you for the link. Is there any precedent for a law that involves coin flips (randomness)? My hunch is that while they sound great in an economy paper, they're too easy to shoot down politically.

>A more innovative approach, I think, would be for the government to buy out leading textbooks at a premium and after holding an auction to determine the fair price.

Yep, subsidies never go wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com