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February 02, 2005
Open Source Textbooks?
Today while staring off into space, in the general direction of my bookcase, I became slightly jealous of a friend of mine who studied Philosophy in college. All the Philosophy books, for the most part, were written by people who've been dead for a long time, and thus the books are in the public domain and very cheap. Math books, on the other hand, don't follow this pattern and end up being very expensive, even used (though Ebay's Half.com had all my books at nice, cheap prices this time around).
I've always wanted to write a Calculus book that doesn't suck. The likelihood of any publisher picking me up as a writer, though, is NULL for all intents and purposes. I then thought that it might be neat to make an open source text book and problem set, distributed under the Creative Commons license.
I looked at their website today and noticed that a Physics Teacher in California has self-published a series of intro Physics books which one can buy for cheap, or download for free. I just finished taking a look at the first one and I'm quite impressed. He seems to acknowledge that the people that will be using this text might not, in fact, already have a degree in math. I like it.
Anyway, I'm a little more inspired to try to tackle the math book now. The trick, I think, will not be writing it (this can be farmed out, as well) but coming up with an approach that works well. Any suggestions?
Posted by james at February 2, 2005 12:48 AM
Comments
Hey guys,
Here is a CPR course very near to the side of town you guys and gals (fully grown and wee ones) will be on:
http://www.westmetrofire.org/index.cfm?main.page=article&catid=11&detailsid=53
Hope this helps,
Adrian
Posted by: Adrian A. Villarreal at February 3, 2005 10:21 AM
I suggest you write it. You write well, and it would be something to work on for a long term project. Not that your upcoming child won't keep you busy. And your friend in philosophy is now trying to study medicine, which means books will be nearly $2,000 a year. He needs some open source medical texts, though I doubt any school would use them.
Posted by: Launchpad at February 3, 2005 06:51 PM