Posts Tagged ‘free textbooks’

The Case for Free Textbooks – Reprint

March 5th, 2010

So, we published a piece about our thoughts about the free textbook movement and this is an extension of our thoughts.

“Students having access to free textbooks is essential for fostering real change in the textbook industry, for it forces major publishers to reevaluate their business models.  Will free textbooks mean a drop in quality? Absolutely not!  Take for example the transformation in the music industry when illegal downloading became commonplace, this phenomenon (albeit illegal) forced music companies to reevaluate their business models and treat their customers with more respect and actually listen to their their demands.  Now customers don’t have to purchase entire albums, unless they choose to AND the quality of the album warrants.  So, this would actually be a case for the quality of music going up, rather than down based on the “free” model.  Is the quality of textbooks suddenly going to dive because companies such as our are offering free textbooks? Absolutely not, and one could argue that the quality will go up.  Publishers will have to evaluate the exorbitant prices they charge for the few changes in new editions of non-free textbooks.  Moving toward more free textbooks in the marketplace will force publishers to consider what changes are of “actual” worth to the students and faculty.  This would mean that if a publisher is putting out a new edition, it better be worth it or the free textbook alternative will squash the push for new editions.

Another reason companies/publishers can provide free textbooks like ours: they/we can give away their base product and charge for all their other ancillary products, study guides, teaching videos, or printed copies.

To correlate this example back to music, take the fact that some bands allow recording of live concerts such as The Grateful Dead and Dave Matthews.  Do concert goers stop purchasing live albums because they could get a copy from their friends free?  Absolutely not, those two bands have some of the top live album sales.  Do you think people stopped going to the shows because they could get a recently recorded show on the internet? Absolutely not, both bands are top touring bands, selling out across the country, selling tons of merchandise (ancillary products), just like providing free textbooks will do for the textbook industry.

The Worldwide Center of Mathematics offers licensing for departments to alter the content, upgrade, and edit as they choose.  This is the perfect scenario for professors to be able to control the content they are teaching their students. Instructors can reorganize the content, and edit, down to the sentence, to improve the experience for both students and teachers.  Departments can even license the content and sell it for a profit.

Lastly, free textbooks will also force publishers to publish only content relevant to the subject matter, instead of stuffing the pages with unnecessary content to justify a $200 price-tag, much like demand for “significant” and “useful” change to new editions.”

Please email me your thoughts es (at) centerofmath.org.

Also, please support the folks at the Student PIRG’s on their affordability campaign.

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Tags: free textbooks music industry

Help make textbooks affordable – The Student PIRG’s

March 5th, 2010

So the folks over at Student PIRG’s are making huge headway in the campaign to lower textbook prices.  Their web site is a great resource for getting involved and especially for joining the campaign.

A litte more about the campaign.

“What can we do about it?

The solution isn’t simple. We can’t require publishers to lower their prices or force professors to choose less expensive books, since we do not want to infringe on the first amendment or lower the quality of education. We can only solve the problem by fundamentally changing the way that the textbooks market works.

Here is where students come in. We don’t have much economic power against the publishers, but we do have the power to challenge their practices by running a grassroots campaign!

Textbook publishers should have to price their products fairly to gain student customers, and students should have their choice of a range of competing products designed to fit different learning styles and budgetary needs. Students should decide whether to keep, or when to sell their books, and purchase only the supplemental items they need. Higher education is essential to our future, and textbooks should not make it even harder to afford.”

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Of course our shameless plug is for our free textbooks, Worldwide Differential Calculus is free to download on the our site and inexpensive printed copies are available for purchase.

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Tags: affordability campaign free textbooks PIRG's

Is the iPad a Kindle Killer? – tidbits.com

February 23rd, 2010

As we’ve always said here at WWCoM, we’re platform agnostic, that is, we don’t favor one type of device to view our free textbooks.  But we’re very excited to see the iPad, how many days until it’s released?

From tidbits.com

Media companies leak like sieves, so it was known for a long time before the iPad announcement that Apple was having conversations with book, newspaper, and magazine publishers about what those firms would want in an ideal device and in ideal software. We saw the first fruits of those discussions at the iPad launch, with the New York Times demonstrating a hastily revised demo app, and with Apple’s bundled iBooks app.

Apple didn’t discuss magazine and newspaper subscriptions, but the New York Times demo showed that Apple was clearly looking to the existing app approach coupled with in-application or one-time fees to suffice for that model.

For books, however, there’s a new app: iBooks. The program combines a bookstore and a bookshelf, enabling you to purchase books and download them for reading on the device. (The iBookstore was not yet enabled on the iPads available at the 27 January 2010 media event, so I couldn’t test it.)

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Tags: free textbooks iPad Kindle DX

Professor writes textbook in 11 days?

February 23rd, 2010

Well, not exactly, and how could it be any good if he wrote it that fast anyway!  As most of your know we publish our books here at Worldwide Center of Mathematics under a Creative Commons license.  This blog post is from their web site and explains how a professor remixed a textbook and published it in 11 days.

From CreativeCommons.org

Chuck Severance, clinical professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, recently published a new textbook in 11 days because he was able to remix an existing textbook. The book, Python for Informatics: Exploring Information, is currently being used in his winter semester Networked Computing course. The textbook is based on the openly licensed book Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey. Students are able to take advantage of the University Library’s Espresso Book Machine to print on-demand copies for approximately $10. Python for Informatics is available under a CC BY-SA license.

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Tags: free textbooks re-mixable textbooks

Online books let college students earn credit—and cash: eSchoolNews.com

February 23rd, 2010

Very cool program by one of our competitors, we support any movement to make textbooks cheaper or ultimately free.  Free textbooks is a common vision.

From eSchoolNews.com

Nineteen business majors are trying to sell the idea of free online textbooks to their professors in an internship program that pushes open-content technology designed to counter escalating book costs.

The internships, introduced this year by open textbook provider Flat World Knowledge, let sophomore and junior business students earn college credit and a little spending cash if their sales pitch convinces a professor to use web-based texts that can be reorganized and modified by chapter, sentence, or word.

Students from schools that include New York University, the University of Florida, and the College of Charleston are being tutored via webinars by Flat World Knowledge sales pros and authors of textbooks that are sold on the Flat World web site.

The company has grown in the past year as the open-content movement has gained traction in higher education, buttressed by the Creative Commons license—which doesn’t require permission from authors to change parts of a book—and the rising cost of textbooks.

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Tags: free textbooks open textbooks

PRESS RELEASE: Mount Holyoke selects Worldwide Differential Calculus for Spring 2010 (A Conceptual Approach to Calculus)

January 10th, 2010

Cambridge, MA- January 10, 2010- Mount Holyoke, located in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has selected Worldwide Differential Calculus for Spring 2010 semester for new course: A Conceptual Approach to Calculus. This marks a shift in textbook-purchasing decisions as departments are choosing to move from expensive textbooks in favor of less-expensive/free versions, available in a multitude of formats.

The textbook is available for purchase in a bound, full-color, printed version, with an accompanying DVD containing the video lectures; the price for this printed version, with videos, is less than half of the common price for a current Calculus textbook. The PDF of the textbook is, however, free for download on the website.  Students may also purchase, on DVD’s, a study guide, a solution manual, the PDF textbook and video lectures, or the PDF textbook with the videos embedded into the PDF. Faculty and/or departments may license the source files to produce their own customized versions of Worldwide Differential Calculus, which may then be distributed freely to students, or at a profit to the departments or schools.

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Tags: free textbooks PDF textbook

The State of Calculus Textbooks

November 12th, 2009

The current state of textbook prices getting a lot of attention lately….bad press actually.  Can you blame anyone (besides the textbook publishers)?  Our first textbook Worldwide Differential Calculus is free for PDF download and $40 for a print copy, compared to the market leading Jim Stewart Calculus textbook for over $200.  That is astronomical!!  We are fine tuning our textbook to provide the same amount of sample problems, examples, and exposition as all the leading calculus books, so there should be no reason why anyone would choose any other book.

Watch out big publishers…only a matter of time before us small guys take a big bite out of your outdated business model.

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Tags: free textbooks

Nice Huntington News Article

November 6th, 2009

Some Calculus Texts go digital

By Jenna Haines

Published: Monday, September 21, 2009

Some students taking Calculus 1 do not have to lug around a traditional textbook this semester. Mathematics professor David Massey has published an e-textbook covering the material. 
Massey founded the Worldwide Center for Mathematics (WCM) in 2008 to provide a low-cost textbook option for students with a tight budget. “Worldwide Differential Calculus” contains a print text, an online version in PDF form, a DVD of prerecorded lectures about the material, and an additional study guide and solution manual. All of these features can be purchased independently, the textbook for between $40 and $50, and the DVD for $12.50, said Elgin Stallard, a 1999 Northeastern alumnus and business manager of WCM.

Students can buy only what they need and at prices almost 50 percent lower  than conventional textbooks, Stallard said.  “Our goal is to give a better learning platform and provide better pricing,” Stallard says. “We want to give students an option so they are not forced to buy what they don’t need.”  Professor Robert Case, who teaches Calculus 1 for Science and Engineering, has incorporated the textbook into his curriculum, using it as a supplementary text mostly for his honors section. 

While Case said that he sees benefits to this text, he said there are also some drawbacks of electronic texts.  “The technology can be helpful in many ways, as was Gutenberg’s printing technology, especially in the form of creating access of many more people to knowledge,” Case wrote in an e-mail. “But we haven’t yet begun to understand how to use this in a truly wise way yet.” 

Elgin Stallard said other universities in the area are also using this book as a reference for students.  The textbook is designed so professors can customize it to fit their teaching style and even record their own lectures to make available for students. This offers a new tool for professors.

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PRESS RELEASE: The Worldwide Center of Mathematics, LLC, announces the release of Worldwide Differential Calculus – the first in a series of revolutionary e-textbooks

August 19th, 2009

Cambridge, MA- August 19, 2009- Announcing the immediate availability of the first free e-textbook from the Worldwide Center of Mathematics, LLC: Worldwide Differential Calculus. This full-color, extensively hyperlinked PDF, with pop-up margin comments, can be downloaded free from www.centerofmath.com . Students may also download free video files, in which the author lectures on each section of the textbook.  The e-textbook is written in an expository style, but with fully rigorous mathematics. The more cumbersome technical details are relegated to the Technical Matters sections at the ends of chapters.

The textbook is available for purchase in a bound, full-color, printed version, with an accompanying DVD containing the video lectures; the price for this printed version, with videos, is less than half of the common price for a current Calculus textbook. Students may also purchase, on DVD’s, a study guide, a solution manual,  the PDF textbook and video lectures, or the PDF textbook with the videos embedded into the PDF. Faculty and/or departments may license the source files to produce their own customized versions of Worldwide Differential Calculus, which may then be distributed freely to students, or at a profit to the departments or schools.

About the author:

David B. Massey was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1959. He attended Duke University as an undergraduate mathematics major from 1977 to 1981, graduating summa cum laude. He remained at Duke as a graduate student from 1981 to 1986. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1986 for his results in the area of complex analytic singularities.

Professor Massey taught for two years at Duke as a graduate student, and then for two years, 1986-1988, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. In 1988, he was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and went to conduct research on singularities at Northeastern University. In 1991, he assumed a regular faculty position in the Mathematics Department at Northeastern. He has remained at Northeastern University ever since, where he is now a Full Professor.

Professor Massey has won awards for his teaching, both as a graduate student and as a faculty member at Northeastern.  He has published 32 research papers, and two research-level books. In addition, he was a chapter author of the national award-winning book on teaching:  “Dear Jonas: What can I say?, Chalk Talk: E-advice from Jonas Chalk, Legendary College Teacher”, edited by D. Qualters and M. Diamond, New Forums Press, (2004).

Future e-textbooks:

Worldwide Integral Calculus, the second e-textbook from the Worldwide Center of Mathematics, LLC, will be available in the winter of 2010. This will be followed by a series of undergraduate e-textbooks on multi-variable Calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, etc., as well as test-preparation e-books, aimed at prospective undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students.

About the Worldwide Center of Mathematics, LLC:

The Worldwide Center of Mathematics, LLC was founded in the fall of 2008 by David B. Massey, an award-winning professor, with 26 years of college teaching experience, and a leading research mathematician in the area of singularities.

In addition to producing and publishing multimedia textbooks, the Center performs other free services for the mathematical community, such as a providing a freely-accessible Journal of Singularities (which has just sent out limited invitations to submit papers for the first volume), and recording and freely-distributing, via the Web, research lectures which are given before live audiences in our studio classroom. In the future, we hope to provide other services, such as walk-in tutoring for students in the greater-Boston area, and 24/7 online mathematics help.

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