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welcome to my world
Open books
Posted by on June 20, 2011
First of all – sorry for the recent lack of posts. Things have been pretty crazy recently, what with graduation and work and stuff. Not to mention my month-long vacation starting next week…
So today my mentor and I were discussing where to buy (physics) textbooks for college – apparently Amazon is often better than university bookstores – and we ended up talking about how odd it is that many entry-level books priced so exorbitantly. It would make sense if, say, a book on an obscure part of quantum field theory were expensive, because chances are it won’t be a New York Times bestseller. But at that point, is the writer making enough money in the first place to justify going through the whole publishing process? Somehow, I don’t see many scientists relying on royalties for a non-trivial portion of their income. But of course, I don’t know much about this stuff – feel free to correct me.
Anyway, the fact remains that many science textbooks are infinitely expensive even though most students have a finite amount of money. What if books were free? There are quite a few free textbooks available online (my dear friend ‘t Hooft, for example, has useful links) but these are mostly solitary efforts (i.e. lecture notes). What if there were a peer-reviewed, completely volunteer-run, online repository in which people could collaborate to create good physics textbooks (think arXiv, kinda) for use in academic settings. My mentor, for example, thinks that there isn’t a good standalone textbook on nuclear physics – what if you invited a number of physicists to consolidate lecture notes, etc. and try to compile a respectable online book? Mr. A in America, could write chapter 1 of a book on topic B, while Mr. C in China, an eloquent writer on topic D, could write chapter 2. Of course, there’d have to be project editors/directors who would work to maintain cohesiveness and whatnot, but that’s just peanuts.
In the age of open source/free software (I’m writing this on Ubuntu, using free blogging software!) it seems inevitable that the status quo cannot be maintained. Think about how unnecessary publishing in a journal is, now that arXiv exists – you still get your work out there, albeit informally.
I think plenty of people would be willing to come together in an organized manner and contribute their knowledge and expertise out of the goodness of their hearts. But maybe that’s just me. What d’you guys think?
P.S. A related discussion here.
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“Think about how unnecessary publishing in a journal is, now that arXiv exists – you still get your work out there, albeit informally.”
This shows that you don’t really understand the current world of publishing. I agree with you that it *should* be possible to freely disseminate information, but it doesn’t work that way (yet). The same thing is true for publishing: there is a tremendous amount of value in a publishing house doing the editing, layout, graphic design, and organization of your text. I’ve examined numerous free textbooks over the last few years of grad school, and I have yet to find one with the quality of a traditionally published text. Until you can duplicate that (hint: the people who do that work don’t work for free) you won’t be able to get free, high-quality textbooks.
Additionally, the sheer amount of work required to put together a high-quality, contiguous text on a topic is ridiculous. Unless you’re someone like James Stewart (http://www.stewartcalculus.com/), you’re not going to get rich off your efforts — you may not even make enough to make a blip on your income statement. The royalties just barely justify the work most authors end up doing, so it already is a labour of love, and they get the support net of the publishing world as part of it. Extending this to ‘give your work away for free’ doesn’t really fly.
Thanks a bunch for your comment! Got me thinking 🙂
First off – you’re right on. I don’t have much experience with this whole publishing business and I’m sure I’m being _very_ idealistic. The process of publishing for books is integral, I’m sure, to getting them to convey their information to readers (better than that of boring-looking, free books).
However, when it comes to research papers, I feel like the majority of competent scientists use the appropriate tools to make their papers look professional (i.e. LaTeX, BibTeX, etc) and thus the publishing “touchups” are relatively minor. Although I guess all I really meant was that you publish papers to get your work out there, and arXiv reliably allows you to do that (while keeping garbage out).
In terms of whether people are willing to contribute, what you said might definitely hold true for most people. But then again, look at the open source movement. Couldn’t the contributors spend their time more cost-effectively? Probably. But instead, they choose to contribute to society for free.
And I totally agree that it takes a lot of time and effort to write a _good_ book collaboratively. That’s the challenge, I think. I would hope, though, that people, and definitely students, would be willing to contribute (through whatever form – lecture notes, reviews, etc.)