1. Writing 150 pages that are targeted for your class and your students is easier than writing "the bible" for your field.
2. The quality of the first draft might not be great, but if you are getting feedback and constantly improving, it's not long before you are better off than using one of the expensive tomes.
3. If you start with other free material, you can get off to a fast start (several people have now written books that started with my material, and then evolved beyond recognition).
I've had some professors create fully self-contained slide decks for their course with references. Other professors teaching the same course often shared slides. Occasionally a textbook emerges from this material, but not most of the time. I think this is an approximation of your idea and probably the closest we'll get in practice.
Edit: Okay, I see in another child comment that you are a CS professor — how do you make the time to do both?
Just wanted to thank you for all the stuff you have given us. I have found your books to be both delightful and enlightening, and the fact you give them away is pretty astounding. I myself buy the printed copies just to support this work, however I know many many people not of means that I point your resources to with great success.
I don't know if you hear it a lot or not enough, but thank you, sincerely. Solid material you got here.
I think you missed this part
> All of our books are available under free licenses that allow readers to copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material.
Along with the source to all the books, https://github.com/AllenDowney
We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen Downeys
Many of his students are even involved in education in some way (incl. me, I make software for university bookstores).
Well, as this reminds me of a discussion on here that illustrated why 'hopeless idealism' in the face of actual problems of market economics tends never to amount to much, the "answer" readily jumps to mind:
"Create a model for a market which rewards actors who behave similar to [Allen Downeys] and punishes those who do not, and migrate communities to instead use such a system."
Of course, it's a nontrivial (monumental, tbh) solution, but frankly, so is the problem it addresses - we'd have them solved if they weren't. Nonetheless, that is what is needed to 'solve' the problem (rather than merely sidestep it - though that could also be done as a non-lasting 'patch' solution).
Fortunately in this time of flux, few are confident in what "will" actually happen, and thus many are willing to try out new systems. Perhaps someone like you (or even you) will construct such a model in Ethereum or some other market platform which ends up being the dominant one in 20 years.
1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.)
2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do an assigned problem set ("Read Chapter 3, do question 2, 3, 5, 7 on page 148" only applies in the latest edition).
3. Libraries often only have two or three copies of the textbook, and all the students want to access them at the same time (cramming the week before exams).
4. The university library has hours and closes at night.
5. Fewer people buying textbooks leads to textbook publishers increasing per-book costs to cover the fixed costs of a print run, leading to fewer people buying textbooks.
6. Different professors teaching the same course having different preferred textbooks. Both get listed on the course description, but you don't know which one you should buy until the first day of class.
For us, assignments (both problem sheets and essay questions) were written by our tutors. They came with a reading list that would include a selection of relevant articles, books, and textbooks, but there was no single one that you had to use.
The reason being, there is just not enough in the materials budgets to purchase textbooks for every class (especially considering that after a year, many will be "outdated" and need to be replaced) and still have enough money to purchase all the other necessary materials (mostly database subscriptions which cost an arm and a leg, but all the other books they need to purchase as well). However, practically speaking, we can often get copies of individual textbooks on an as-needed basis through interlibrary loan. Usually someone somewhere has a copy, but it's not a solution that can be applied on a university-wide level.
Often a professor will put a copy (that they own) on reserve so it may be used within the library, but those can't be checked out and taken home for use for the entire semester.
Personally, I think it's shameful we don't have a better solution, but that's the state of things here. Many schools are turning toward open educational resources (OER) but it's slow to adopt, because many professors have a favorite textbook and OER texts aren't always of the same quality as mainstream texts. It's a really frustrating situation.
I never bought a textbook unless I absolutely completely needed it. Otherwise I did anything possible to get it if I needed it before outright buying the book. In some cases just using Google was enough for the class. Especially for most of my programming courses. Textbooks are so expensive, and half of the time you don't even go through the whole of the book, not even getting your money's worth because the semester is not long enough for said book. Math textbooks were my only exception, though the school did allow me to borrow them for a few hours.
>> re-read a text book about a year after I had finished the class...
>> it really helped me deepen my understanding of the topic generally.
Several of my professors solved it by supporting the last couple editions of the book vs just the latest. Works for everyone.
My wife got the same degrees 15-20 years later (finance/economics), her courses (at what's now ranked as a "higher" rated university) were the equivalent to what I had in high school.
This wouldn't really have been an issue but when she went to graduate school, it's on par (difficulty wise) with the 90s. So the gap she had to make up was extraordinary.
> If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard.
I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering that the set of professors who currently choose to write their own textbooks probably skews toward professors who are good at writing textbooks, I'm not super high on this plan.
> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50, don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no excuse for bad books.
Many students already do this. It's not uncommon for students to not buy a single textbook in a semester. In fact, the professors that do care about textbook price generally make textbooks optional. It turns out that's a lot easier than writing your own textbook and somehow selling it for cheap.