California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation | Hacker News Reader

California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation

creativecommons.org

283 pointsdrostie73 comments

I am hugely in favor of this move. It's a tiny first step to decreasing the cost of education and further opening educational access to truly everyone.

But, if I may indulge in a cynical moment, I note that one of the touted benefits of CC-BY in the article is that commercial companies can develop tutorials from these tax-payer funded books.

What if the tutorials then become the required texts? Are there any safeguards from this? If not, it's inevitable that it will be done.

As I see it, commercial companies already develop learning tools--high school and college textbooks. These coursebooks are already required reading in classes. There already exist companies that profit off of universal education.

That's not to say that there should be, but I think the situation will get better. With higher quality free educational texts, the for-profit companies will have to produce much better material or lower their prices to keep sales up. Either way, it seems like the learners benefit.

It would be better if they choose CC-BY-SA, which requires that derived works be under that licence aswell.

(Neither CC-BY nor CC-BY-SA block commerical use, and that's fine IMO)

Indeed, one example of commercial use that's possible (and desirable!) under these licenses is printing the books and selling them. Blocking that would make it harder to get the books into students' hands.

If it was share-alike, why would companies develop tutorials, since they could be re-published by other companies at close to cost price?

There are loads of companies the make money off open source software. Same principal.

Yeah, this is the BSD vs. GPL issue. If you want to ship BSD/Apache-licensed stuff you better have good marketing so that someone doesn't use your own software to crush you (BSDI-style, if anyone remembers that).

Government has no profit motive and so no concern of being crushed by commercial competition.

The point of this project is to save students money, so it will be judged a failure if people keep buying proprietary books.

There is something I don't understand. From the article it seems that this only provides for the creation of free/affordable textbooks, but does not force the use of them in colleges. Am I wrong thinking that affordable textbooks are already available? What is being done to prevent colleges and professors from using 150$, annual, nth edition of the same old textbooks?

Exactly. Directly from the bill "Nothing in this section shall be construed to mandate faculty use of any particular textbook or related materials."

Western civilization, calculus, algebra, 19th century American literature. Yeah, you are going to need the up-to-date 30th-Anniversary collector's edition with never-before-read author's commentary and over 15 pages of deleted problem sets.

What if courses were required to show the total cost of the progam including the cost of mandatory textbooks?

That way, at least the students know the full price of what they're in for.

The thing is the cost of text-books can vary a lot. Very often you can get a used text book, or even a new one for cheaper than advertised by going online. Students can and do share textbooks. So publishing a total price is very impractical, and if you care that much the required texts are often listed next to the course for you to look up yourself.

At first glance it would seem only logical that the use of these textbooks be made mandatory. On the whole I agree, that this first step is necessary but insufficient, an that without teeth its effect will be much weaker.

However, imposing at the state level one particular textbook per subject matter would be foolish - imagine just 10% of the textbooks are badly done and you have 5 classes out of 50 that would be required to be taught with poor textbooks, which doesn't make much sense.

That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. These textbooks are open and allow other textbooks to be made from them, so what could be done is telling colleges today that they will be mandated to use cc textbooks in classes 2 years after these textbooks are first published. This creates an incentive for variations on the textbooks to be made, gives teachers time to test out the materials and modify it if need be, and ensures that when the mandate comes into force: a) teachers can choose from different options of cc textbooks for each class b) no class is taught with a badly written though mandated textbook

I'd suggest a series of deadlines for rising use: 10% of textbooks should be open by date X, 20% by date Y, etc.

This would give time for early-adopting professors to try things out, for the textbook creators to iterate, and those who don't like the books to create their own if they prefer.

That seems like a very sensible approach too. I think we agree that the main idea for implementation is a kind of progressive approach, and I'm sure there's plenty of experimentation on the topic to draw from and come up with a smart and efficient plan.

The distinction you make between "professors" and "textbook creators" seems strange to me here. At least two of the best textbooks I've seen were written by a professor who was teaching the class and wanted something different than the other books.

I think this is the ideal way for them to be written. The idea of having separate "textbook companies" seems more like what happens in high school, and it produces pretty bad textbooks.

I agree. I was actually imagining that, say, the history department at some school would team up to write a textbook and publish it. What better way to build your department's reputation?

You're right; departments might do it for the prestige. And of course it might make their teaching easier to have a textbook customized to exactly how they teach the course (after the initial work of writing it).

Speaking as a professor, I'd be furious if some legislator told me exactly which textbook to use. I'm concerned about book prices, certainly, but mandating a specific text would immediately shut down the few attempts at innovation in textbooks or curriculum that do exist.

If the new books are of comparable quality to the current market leaders in a given discipline (and especially if we eventually get some competition between free texts), then all that will be necessary will be an education campaign to make sure faculty know what's available. We do care about this stuff! (Or at least, a lot of us do.)

And some care about the kickbacks from forcing students to buy $150 textbooks that cannot be bought used because there's a new "edition" every year that shuffles the practice problems.

That's what needs to be prevented in some way.

Who's getting kickbacks? I've never gotten a kickback. I really want to know if you know of a kickback scam.

The high prices could be due to just the opposite problem: professors are particularly difficult to sell to. They are individually picky about how their subject matter is presented, and textbook meetings (where we try to agree on the textbook among colleagues at a particular school) are frustrating and difficult.

The time and effort expended in selling those books are (probably) enormous. There's no institutional path-to-sale. Decisions are made by the professors themselves, meaning it's close to b2c marketing of a b2b product. The problem, in business terms (stolen from a VC spiel to an entrepreneur group as to why they don't fund educational software) is that "the customer is dysfunctional."

Professors write textbooks and make their students buy them. Thats the scam. I remember vividly the pain during college of buying $150 textbooks that would be worth $30 the next year because a (n+1) edition would be released with a couple new pages just to mess up all the page references and exercises.

That's a very small effect. A professor doesn't make much money off of a single textbook- selling to one class wouldn't be worth the trouble of writing. Even revision (working with the editor) is aggravating. And if you have co-authors? Forget it.

Writing the text book is an act of love and/or vanity. Only if your textbook becomes a "standard" (Halliday/Resnick, etc.) does it provide direct financial rewards.

EDIT: I agree with you about the 3-year cycle, but that's not the authors' doing, it's the publishers'. That's their business model.

> That's a very small effect. A professor doesn't make much money off of a single textbook- selling to one class wouldn't be worth the trouble of writing.

Unless you sell it to a new class (possibly multiple classes) every year.

> Even revision (working with the editor) is aggravating.

That assumes an editing process that isn't streamlined and automated towards the singular goal of making previous editions obsolete and forcing students to always buy the most recent one.

Unless you sell it to a new class (possibly multiple classes) every year.

For what? $1K a year? Would you do it? I wouldn't. The money isn't there.

That assumes an editing process that isn't streamlined and automated towards the singular goal of making previous editions obsolete and forcing students to always buy the most recent one.

That's quite a conspiratorial stretch to think the authors do that. Think for a moment about what it would take to write a textbook that would be acceptable to a group of experts. You would be an expert in a very small part of the field. It would take you immense work and study to make sure you had the facts right on all of the parts for which you are not the world authority. That is really hard work.

The three-year obsolescence plan is a publisher model, not an author model.

If I were a professor who wrote a textbook based on a class I teach, of course I'd make it the textbook I use and make everyone buy a copy. Chances are that the textbook's material closely matches what I actually want to teach in the class. Why wouldn't I want to use my own path through the material? No other textbook is going to match identically or synthesize the material in my way.

I agree. So you would sell, assuming it was an introductory-course textbook for a popular class (best-case scenario), what- a few hundred copies? And that's under the conditions above.

My mechanics teacher wrote our textbook. We had about 10 people in our class. How much money do you think he made? Even if a few other schools adopted it (a VERY difficult task unless you work on your network of friends- which doesn't always go over well in academia), we're talking small money.

He could consult a few hours a year for an aerospace company or something and make a lot more. That's my point.

Why not give the book away to students as part of their tuiton and earn your salary as a university professor?

Because human beings generally have selfish interests. If you tell a person they may own and control a thing for profit, many will choose to do so.

Unsurprisingly, this is a choice made by a large number of professors

> Writing the text book is an act of love and/or vanity. >

You are making the assumption that the author will make a deal with a traditional publisher which will give him/her a 5% to 10% royalty cut. This strategy does not not come out to a lot of money.

I am currently self-publishing a textbook˚ and getting 75% profit margins: $40 sale price - $10 printing cost = $30. My students and friends have been my editors and my proofreaders. LaTeX is my typesetter. If I can sell 1000 copies each term, that would be $60000/year which would pay my rent and allow me two write for a living.

To be honest, though, I must say that love and vanity also factor into the motivation for this project, yet I had always thought of it as a business all this time. Your comment is spot on dhimes, and made me learn something about my true motivations. Thx!

________

[˚] A math and physics textbook for adults. It covers high school math, calculus, mechanics, E&M and linear algebra in just 350 pages. Email if you want to know more.

My friend, unless you are extremely well known or a brilliant self-marketer, you are going to learn something important about the industry. There's a reason that the finances of the industry work out the way they do.

Importantly, if you want widespread adoption, you need to target a course. Yours targets several. I've seen a few hybrid-course experiments where the instructors combine courses that have been traditionally taught separately (like calculus and physics), but they are to my knowledge still rare. I've not seen a course like the one you are writing a textbook for. Who teaches such a course?

> if you want widespread adoption, you need to target a course.

You may be right about that, but I think there is also value in a single book which covers all these subjects in an integrated manner. Especially Calculus and Physics, which are very co-dependent.

Imagine the use case of someone who wants to learn science on their own. Perhaps he/she is taking an online course which has calculus, physics and linear algebra as prerequisites. Traditionally this would mean he/she has to get three different textbooks (400+ pages each) and slog through all that material. There are excellent free books out there on all of these subjects so money will not be an issue, but going through 1200+ pages will be very time consuming.

This is the gap I want to fill: (1) textbook for self-learners, (2) add-on material for a university class, (3) reference book for adults who want to review the material they learned while at uni.

For audiences (1) and (3) having an 5-in-1 product is definitely a good thing. For audience (2) having all the extra material might make my book appear off-topic and decrease interest. In the next iteration, I am going to think about splitting the narrative to make books for individual subjects to cater more to (2).

I wish you well in your endeavor. It's quite an undertaking!

I can remember exactly two professors who had us use their books. One's was out of print, so we got photocopies for free.

Here's an HN discussion about a particularly egregious example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4405296

There are strong indications in this case and mentioned in the discussion that the textbook industry is actively catering to professors who work like that.

It would be nice to see all picky professors just collaborate on the http://www.wikibooks.org/ site, and simply make their own edits on, for example, the The One True Microbiology Textbook.

For students who need dead trees, the Wikibooks platform already supports printing PDF's.

I had a professor assign his own text once (somewhere around 1996?). It was pretty expensive. At the start of the semester, he gave a $2 refund to everyone who had purchased a brand-new copy, since that was his share of the price we paid. I think there were about 60 students taking the class that year, so that comes out to $120.

Are you really suggesting that $120/year creates some vast moral hazard for college faculty? Or even ten times that?

(The "new edition shuffles problem numbers" thing is irritating to me as a professor, too, by the way. It's not clear to me that even most textbook authors are fond of the continual release of new editions, but it seems to be a big part of the publishers' business model these days.)

Take it to the next level selecting textbooks for required classes at a school with 10,000+ freshman / year that's far more tempting. Even just as an ego thing where you assume 'your' book is much better than all the other options.

But since they are CC you can update/change the "official book" with your changes. You can even sell it yourself. The one thing you cannot do is prevent your edition being copied or improved on.

Mandating books be CC licenced would give great freedom to eductors and protect students.

Speaking as another professor, I quote from SB 1053, section 2, paragraph (c): "Nothing in this section shall be construed to mandate faculty use of any particular textbook or related materials."

Absolutely. I was responding to the parent comment, not to the original article.

My guess is that if state-funded open source CC-BY textbooks are known to exist, substantial social and administrative pressure can be brought to bear on anyone who does not use them. Fine if you don't think it's good enough, but you'd better be able to justify it.

Also, once they exist, if they're CC, then they can be updated to include whatever "innovations" come along in other texts.

A bit of a tangent, but whenever I hear people complaining about greedy professors scamming students into buying their books I think about how much more money many of these highly educated people (particularly STEM people) could be making if they chose not to teach. Most people didn't become professors for the money.

No, it's not good if educators price students out of education, no it's not simple to find funding for education, but we shouldn't expect our educators to be martyrs and then bemoan our declining global education rankings.

They became professors because they enjoy the freedom to self-direct their work and draw a full salary while working on a textbook.

It is called breaking the problem apart into manageable pieces.

As I recall the first time this came up the proposal was to give every 10 yr old (usually their 5th year of school) an e-book that each year would get copies of the textbooks loaded on to, the schools wouldn't need to buy text books and they would always have enough for the students.

It got bogged down (as in tossed out) by the interconnections of various special interests both in the publishing industry and the education system.

This is simpler, allow for the existence of a 'free' textbook. And we can work on making those text books as good as they can be, then allow schools to choose them or not, and then require schools use them once we've got evidence having those textbooks doesn't lower the test scores of students who only have the 'free' textbooks.

I really think this is the proper stop-gap until we get rid of the traditional brick and mortar public schooling all together with something more Khan-esque.

It doesn't hurt that the bottom in the tablet market is falling out, you can put something together that can easily read documents for $50 now.

There was an observation made that the cost of an e-reader would cross below the cost of a single text book (I think the calculus math book is $60) and would replace all the books used by the student for 8 years. The math was pretty straight forward.

EDIT: I just looked up Prentice Hall's high school texts on Amazon [1] and they range from a couple in the $45 dollar range but most clustering around $100.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...

I work for the California Digital Library, and most of my work involves using or writing open source code; and this establishes the California Open Source Digital Library.

Ironically, we launched a textbook site (only for UC) this week http://licensed.cdlib.org

I do not know enough about this to be for or against it. But as a recent college grad it leaves me with two obvious questions.

1. This litigation doesn't address the issue of overpriced textbox, simply bypasses it all together. Is there anyone out there saying that the current selection of textbooks is bad in some way other then there price? I find it astounding that they would pass litigation in an attempt bypassing a whole industry instead of actually addressing the issue.

2. Why can these textbooks be made without this ligation?

Probably trying to bypass Texas, which usually decides text book standards based on market consumption.

Not sure how subsidies are going to make anything "better". I would think it would be a way for a lot of low quality producers to flood the market. Now, rather than competitive pressure potentially keeping quality in place, the state will need to provide oversight functions, either in awarding subsidies, or in mandating (and deciding) what goes into the textbooks, either of which will be another great place for patronage jobs.

I think you are confusing litigation with legislation

Sound brilliant with one small question "So, in addition to making the digital textbooks available to students free of cost, the legislation requires that print copies of textbooks will cost about $20. ". Small question about biasing for those students who have access to a device that can read the free open source version, for many a hardcopy is also more suitable. So to legaly control a price saying "about $20" does somewhat raise questions as to the definition of "about" as a fiscal term and more so. Who do you pay to print out your own copy? Becasue as it reads, if you print it out then you should be paying "about $20" for it and this is completely unclear. Least to me it is.

Still motives are good and anything moving in the right common sence direction has to be applauded.

Yeah, the $20-to-print requirement will get tricky. Imagine a biology textbook with detailed color pictures. Do you have to remove some because color printing is expensive? Is it acceptable if you can print a text-only version of the book for $20 and look at the pictures online? Is it acceptable to sell a supplementary illustrations book?

The real win here is for students to be able to download the whole book for free. In principle, your entire textbook budget for college could be the price of an e-book reader.

So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner? Or is this a choice that certain authors can make?

If it's the former, financial incentives for textbook authors have fallen precipitously. So, the question is, who's going to write these "free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges"? Might the authors receive government subsidies? If this is true, then we're simply shifting from a market mechanism to a government funded model. Either the cost of writing a textbook won't actually change, the quality will go down, or we'll have many fewer options to choose from.

"So now textbook authors are forced to license their books in such a manner?" No. This would be much bigger news if that were the case. This is who would make them from the council digest: "The bill would require the council to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials, meeting specified requirements." This will enable the exact opposite of your last three conjectures. It will decrease the cost of textbooks, the quality will go up, and we'll have even more options to choose from. Plus this is a big win for other educational enterprises. Under the CC BY license outside industries will be able to utilize the material for commercial endeavors.

I offer a Linear Algebra that is Free. Some years ago I was contacted by some people in California and prompted to apply to become some kind of official Free source in that state; it involved filling out some forms on some web sites. That I can tell, nothing ever came of it. So I'm a bit dubious about this initiative.

I love his response in the video. Seems like it took the guy only a couple of seconds to realise how much sense the idea makes. He would have done his research prior to the meeting but his attitude toward it is great.

So which textbooks will this include? Do they need the publishers' permission to redistribute their existing work under a CC BY license?

Quoting from the linked text of SB 1052

"The council shall establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013.

Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit or restrict the council from developing or acquiring, either for a charge or for free, existing high-quality digital open source textbooks and related materials that otherwise meet the specifications of this section."

So it looks like next year there will be a RFP for funds for developing the texts (assuming they don't use existing digital open source texts). And anyone (including folks here) could apply to that RFP, though I assume people used to the process will have a distinct advantage.

An earlier section of the bill establishes a committee to determine exactly which 50 books will be developed.

I wonder if they'll use the existing CC-BY textbooks produced by OpenStax (or others) for some of these courses? http://openstaxcollege.org/

As a non-California resident, Jerry Brown seems to be doing a pretty impressive job. He seems to talk about the real issues, especially when Cali's budget, and puts good legislation through.

Brown is a California resident.

I meant to say "from the perspective of a non-California resident"

The idea is great but the textbook companies just will tack on manditory $85 software while not having to pay book royalties... the insanity shall continue.

Curious if any fellow HN'ers know when these textbooks would be made available. Dont see any info on the linked page.

One of the bills establishes a committee to select the courses, so presumably it will be a little while.

Great step from california. Hoping that some `indian` politician read this :-)

Feynman would be happy.

Fucking finally.

I hope the rest of the country follows.

p.s.

It's pretty sad this obvious move is considered "groundbreaking". All it took is a pair of balls.

Alright, textbooks are expensive and it's a step in the right direction. But with average costs for textbooks around $1,200 per year it's not much compared to the cost of tuition.

Consider community colleges. At least in California, their tuition is still low enough that textbooks are a significant portion of the cost.

http://students.ucsd.edu/finances/financial-aid/budgeting/un...

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