Comments on: Open Source: The Textbooks of the Future

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:24:37 +0000

I think that this sounds like a great idea. All the money I spent on books in college was pretty much a waste of money. If the colleges don’t embrace something like this it just makes them look out of touch with technology, which is not a good thing for colleges, in my opinion.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:22:31 +0000

I think the idea of “open” textbooks sounds great. Anything I was required to buy in college was a big waste of money and a system like this just stomps all over anything I was required to use for textbooks in college. If colleges don’t embrace systems like this, it just shows how out of touch they are with current technologies, in my opinion.

By: gmtt007

gmtt007 — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:43:06 +0000

I think another problem of high price is, the publisher makes a book too fancy driving its cost high. Why a text book has to have hard covers, glossy paper, too colorful? Why not print in soft cover with cheap paper – specially when a book has a self life of no more than 2 semesters anyway? If the publishers and schools want to make money by cornering the students that is one thing (because student have virtually no other good choices), but if the publishers and schools want to promote education and keep the price low by cutting all possible corners that is another thing, and I think former is what is in existence. I am hopeful that in this era of e-communication time is not far away when the students will get relief of this scheme.

By: charmedlover

charmedlover — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:30:18 +0000

Colleges solve the “updated” textbook problem by just requiring the students to buy new texbooks each year, lol. Electronic textbooks would be nice, especially since the paper versions are simply so expensive. My Calc textbook was $100 in print and $30 for the eBook version, exept my professor required the print version so I didn’t have much of a choice. It would have been nice otherwise though, lol.

By: StevenHu

StevenHu — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:45:47 +0000

It is not about greed, but about what the market will bear.

By: damienharrison

damienharrison — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:49:36 +0000

Ive been looking at the Sony e-book reader but have been put off for a while as for some reason ebook prices are not much cheaper then the printed version, this I feel is a sense of greed in the publishers themselves as most of the costs involved are no longer their.

For this initiative to take off the publishers have got to stop their greed!!

By: hfinger

hfinger — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:22:37 +0000

TheBuzzSaw:

It’s not the authors who set the absurd prices but the publishers. Authors get about 10 to 12.5 percent of the cover price. But under the current publishing model, profits (if not for these, why would publishers bother), the cost of printing a large quantity of books, many of which will ultimately be pulped, warehousing them until they are all sold or pulped, and margins to retailers plus the costs of freighting orders and returns, is where the major costs are.

Clearly a new model based on print-on-demand at widely dispersed outlets for physical books, or wikis or PDF files for electronic books is way to go as it cuts out the most costly factors in the traditional publishing and distribution set-up.

By: TheBuzzSaw

TheBuzzSaw — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:01:03 +0000

I fully support this. In the years to come, I plan on donating to any open textbook causes. The current cycle of authors selling textbook for absurd prices to poor students needs to end.