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> that accept contributions (e.g. chapters) from reputable academics from around the world.

As someone currently doing something like that, I'd say it massively complicates the process of getting a coherent book finished this decade. The first issue is that people never deliver their chapters on time! Everyone's busy, and it's like herding cats to get a bunch of well-known people to deliver a manuscript, which is usually not the most pressing thing on their TODO list. (I'm guilty of it also.) The second issue is that if you want it to be a coherent textbook, vs. more of a collection-of-tutorials style anthology, everyone has to be on the same page about the overall approach the textbook is taking, and the chapters have to fit together closely. This is particularly important when later material builds on earlier material, and needs to do so in a way that works pedagogically (as is almost always the case in a CS textbook). Which requires a lot more Skype meetings and usually iteration on the chapters.

In our case we tackled it by having three primary "in-house" authors, at the same institution, who decided on the overall approach of the textbook, and outlined the whole thing. At least one of us was then also a co-author on every chapter; external contributors were invited within this context, to write part of a chapter in collaboration with us. This helped integrate the external contributions a bit more easily, and made sure they fit in to the book. And we had only about 8 external contributors. I would definitely not want to go all the way to having completely separate chapters written by different people and try to integrate them, and get the book finished before 2020.

The short version is: it's a good idea, but integrating multiple people's contributions into a coherent textbook is hard. If you take 10 people, and take 1 chapter each from the textbook they would've each written if they were writing the whole thing, the most likely result is not a coherent textbook, but 10 chapters that don't really fit together. Not just in the sense that you'd word things a bit differently, but that you'd organize the book completely differently and emphasize completely different material, so the result doesn't introduce material in a progression that's useful to a reader trying to learn the subject.

Firstly, thanks for doing what you're doing. Even if it is a hassle to get it all together, I hope that the more people engaging in this type of effort can only be a good thing.

I agree that the coherency of the text book would be poor if everything was written by different authors. In fact, it is often so jarring when I read a journal article with different writing styles, that it is one of the easiest ways for me to identify plagiarism in student work or when reviewing for journals.

I guess the answer would be to have particularly committed and experienced editors like you mentioned in your attempt.

Perhaps if the book started of as quite a basic book, with key concepts, written by one person. Then, over time, that person (or small group of people) could accept pull requests from the community, and modify them to fit the style of the original book.

This could work quite similarly to most open source software projects:

1) Start of with one or a few people

2) Build only enough functionality for a working/useful piece of software

3) Over time, build up functionality via community contributions (and further contributions from the original contributors)

4) The direction of the project is steered by a group of people with its best interest in heart

Note how in the example of software, there is a fully working thing (even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles attached) quite early in the process. Also, the overall vision for the project is kept in line by the original maintainer, who runs an eye over each pull requests and is free to make suggestions for changes. If there is any major disagreements, people from the community are free to fork the software and make it suit their needs.

I don't know how practical this is, in that a text book without huge amounts of detail may have less usefullness than a piece of software without huge amounts of functionality. Perhaps there are some fields which would benefit from such an approach, while others really do need to have a comprehensive, "finished" book to be of any use to anyone.

> a basic book, with key concepts, written by one person [...] without huge amounts of detail

For math and physics you can get pretty far with definitions and key formulas. As for succinctness of the explanations, it all depends of the "level of description" for the coverage. The more math notation used, the shorter the text will be, but also less readable.

In addition to the notation, you must control the vocabulary and the level of abstraction which you use in the narrative. The language level in advanced math textbooks is level="grad student", most science textbooks assume level="some college", most science news articles are level="high school", general media assume level=middle school", except Fox and CNN who give primary-school-level explanations of World politics.

In my experience, writing explanations for the "some college"-level readers can be quite succinct so I think your idea of a pared-down minimum viable textbook is possible. For example, a short intro to machine learning could start from 100pp of short-form lecture notes that explains the basic ideas and formulas, solved example problems and maybe some code---godda have some code in there if it's about ML. Writing such a text is just 6 months of work, whereas writing a full ML book would take years. Once the basic notation, definitions, and math prerequisites are written down, there could be 20-30 separate applications chapters (10-30pp each) where a single idea of ML is described by someone knowledgeable about it (perhaps not a researcher, the best would be a grad student). Bonus points for complete code examples. Pull requests for typo-fixes and requests for additional explanations ensue. And Bam!, ML textbook v1.0 done. A textbook in a year.

(v2.0 one year later can add more applications, add applications of the applications, or additional introductory material (tutorials) to make the book more accessible.)

> it is often so jarring when I read a journal article with different writing styles,

I think this will be and important problem with book-collab projects... How do you meld the voices (and egos!) of 30 people in a single narrative?

> I understand that "getting your name out there" is not motivation enough for doing such things. However, surely just doing it for the good of education and teaching is motive enough?

I presume you must be under 30 from your statement since: Anyone who is under 30, and is not a leftist, has no heart; and anyone who is over 30, and is not a capitalist, has no brains. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattributed)

There must be some sort of monetary incentive. Maybe "book writing" funding from fed-gov or prov/state-govs? Maybe paid by universities? Either way there must be money involved if we want to motivate people to invest one year of full time work to write a book on subject X. Making money of the printing seems like the best choice to me... and, interestingly, charging for printing is totally compatible with GFDL.

I think print-on-demand and self-publishing is a good first start---it puts more power in authors' and readers' hands, which are the only people that matter in the value chain. It's going to get very interesting in the book publishing sector in the coming years, I promise ;)

> perhaps not a researcher, the best would be a grad student

This reminds me of one of the other frequent failure points of having authors each write a chapter: they write a chapter that is really more of a survey paper about their favorite technique (maybe one they invented or have worked on). Usually that ends up with a choice of content and writing style that's a poor fit for a textbook. A grad student writing about something that is not their own research might be a way of avoiding that.

I agree some kind of incentive is probably needed. It could be monetary, could be advancement-based, depends on the people writing and their situation. On the other hand, money might help for both: if there were grants for textbook writing, which e.g. a professor could use to buy out some of their own teaching and pay their summer salary, it'd also help out with the angle of "if I spend a year writing this book instead of journal articles, will I still get [tenure | full professor | etc.]?", because getting grant money is usually counted as a plus for advancement.

There are some areas that have stronger internal incentives, mostly those in which there is significant controversy, and people have strong opinions about the Right Way to do something. The belief that existing books were doing it wrong and he could write one that introduced things correctly was what motivated Robert Harper to write his 2012 programming languages textbook, for example. Another variant of this is if there are no textbooks on a subject so far, and you feel it's as a result being overlooked: then writing a textbook can be a form of evangelism for your new field. There is less incentive to write a good textbook "for free" on established and uncontroversial subjects.

THIS

In my country there is currently a debate because we used to have a relatively big "industry" of photocopied textbooks because of the high prices of books.

Some weeks or months ago, the police closed a lot of this places that photocopied books (mostly in front of the law school oh the irony), and now, nobody wants to photocopy books.

I got really angry (not because I photocopied books, I have most of my book in pdf) but because the state university (the biggest and for some the best) likes to talk about how "anyone" can study for free (as in beer ;) but nobody talks about the huge bill of books you have if you buy them legally.

I thought about some kind of wiki-like platform for books where not only teacher, but also students can collaborate to create and maintain the books.

I would love to see this in reality, I wanted to start it myself, but really don't have the time/resources to get to it.

I remember the practice of using photocopied textbooks during my undergrad. The place I am from, its quite common to use photocopies of textbooks because most books are very expensive. Besides, there were specific shops that used kerosene in the photocopiers (I don't know how it works though)and that reduced the cost of photocopying per page by almost a third or the original price. I remember distinctly that the photocopies you get by this method would carry a kerosene stink and sometimes the ink would fade over time.

"Besides, there were specific shops that used kerosene in the photocopiers (I don't know how it works though)and that reduced the cost of photocopying per page by almost a third or the original price."

Kerosene is/was subsidised in many places (e.g. India), I think because every needs to eat (and therefore everyone needs fuel for their stove.)

I have a project that I've been working on (http://arturo.io). It does what you have described. It's not ready, but I want to have these and other books automatically generated from pull requests and converted to the major formats.

"I understand that there is a huge amount of money involved, but surely the only stakeholders who benefit are:"

Missed the school since many benefit by getting a % on each sale. Higher price equals more money.

I spent the last 4 years at university and digital textbooks are almost never prescribed because students like hard copies. Your argument that educational establishments don't stand to benefit much financially from traditional textbooks is probably true, but not really the issue.

You are absolutely correct. I guess the answer would be that if such books were, e.g. CC licensed, then hard copies would be able to be printed. Given the prevailence of self publishing firms available, one would hope there is a market for text book publishers who compete on the printing price alone. Such companies needn't even be publishers themselves, but rather a middleman which makes use of self publishing services.