[HN Gopher] In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
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In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
I have recently been using the Linear Algebra book by Jim Hefferon
to study the subject. This is because I'm taking a linear algebra
course in college, I am visually impaired, and the books I get from
college are literally unusable. As a person who has to use a
Screen Reader, math in PDFs is almost impossible to read for me.
The problem is almost insurmountable if the PDF is a collection of
images, but even if it is a LaTeX-generated PDF, reading anything
but the simplest of equations is very, very hard. In these cases,
having the LaTeX source to read is a godsend. To the authors who
publish the source of their books: thank you, thank you. I cannot
express how grateful I am. To anyone who is related to /working in
the publisher space: it would be incredibly useful if there was a
process to get the LaTeX source of books upon request, although I
understand how copyrights/etc might make this difficult. Some
other books I would like to point out for being open source: Apex
Calculus, Open Data Structures.
Author : lightveil
Score : 293 points
Date : 2021-06-06 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
| dehrmann wrote:
| I have no idea how commercial textbooks for anything up to
| specialized, college-level classes are viable. You'd think that
| enough states (and countries) would put the work into the
| Wikibooks calculus book so it meets their standards and just use
| that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| In other countries textbooks are cheap because (as you say) the
| subject matter is more or less agreed-upon so there are just a
| few different textbooks largely distinguished by the quality of
| the writing and presentation.
|
| In the US students are treated as a captive audience and
| publishers work hard to get professors and education
| authorities to specify particular books, which are then sold at
| a very high mark-up. The incentives ought to be purely academic
| but in practice are often material or financial.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yeah. I'm not quite sure how it works in the US, but here in
| the UK we have strong student unions that often have a good
| relationship with the university whose students they
| represent. I think any professor attempting this would get
| shut down pretty quickly.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The word _union_ is anathema to many in the US.
| wrycoder wrote:
| And they make sure to publish new editions with relatively
| minor changes every few years. Then they sell a Chem 101 text
| for $175. It's like the price is inverse to the number of
| readers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't get it, either. I laugh when schools complain their
| textbooks are "old and outdated". So what? Has there been a
| revolution in algebra I didn't hear about?
|
| I also laugh when teachers say they expend all this effort
| making "lesson plans". There are 3.7 _million_ teachers just in
| the U.S. You 'd think they could share them?
| coryrc wrote:
| You're absolutely correct on your second point.
|
| But for the first point, as poor as research in education is,
| there have been improvements in educational methods. I read
| some examples about the Common Core mathematics pedagogy,
| prepared to be as angry as Feynman, but they were actually
| teaching kids how to do arithmetic the way I do (which is way
| better than New Math or brute force methods): 99x5 is 500-5
| not 5+(4+5)*10+400. Are their changes more likely to be
| improvements rather than demerits? I do not know.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There have certainly been _changes_ in educational methods,
| but I doubt there are improvements. Math achievement has
| been flat for the last 50 years. The "new math" and "look-
| say" methods were largely invented to drive new textbook
| sales.
| coryrc wrote:
| I think you should look into the complaints about common
| core; I think, if you're good at arithmetic (like I
| assume most of us programmers are), that you'll find the
| current methods an improvement over those and about as
| good as can be done by our grade-segregated, "no-child-
| left-behind", Prussian educational system.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I learnt arithmetic in the early sixties. 99x5 would be
| 9x5x10+9x5 = 450+45 = 495
|
| Perhaps it helped that we all knew the 12 times tables.
|
| Is there some new magical way of doing long multiplication
| that is more effective _and_ easier to understand?
| coryrc wrote:
| 999999*5 is far easier as 5000000-5 than 45+450+4500+...
|
| Are you really arguing that the latter is faster and more
| effective to do in your head?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Not at all. I didn't know we were discussing mental
| arithmetic.
| coryrc wrote:
| Even on paper it's far simpler
|
| (1000000-1)*5 => 5000000-5 => 4999995
|
| Learning to find these patterns early sets up students
| for having an easier time with algebra later. Algebra is
| just rearranging equations. I don't understand, but
| students do struggle with going from "12/3=?" to "3*X=12
| solve for X". We can't keep failing so many students
| every year and expect our country to hold together.
| burkaman wrote:
| Have you ever talked to any of these people you're laughing
| at? Maybe there is some nuance or background you're not aware
| of.
|
| I'm not a teacher, but I think often when they talk about old
| textbooks, the issue is that they are physically falling
| apart, not just that they were published a long time ago.
| These books are in continuous use by children, so you can't
| compare it to a book you've had on your shelf for 40 years.
| As for lesson plans, most teachers don't have the luxury to
| just pick a plan they think is best. Every state, district,
| individual school might have its own rules about what can and
| must be taught, and teachers often aren't given much say in
| that.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I understand that textbooks fall apart and need
| replacement. I'm just talking about the complaints that
| they are outdated.
|
| The complaint I constantly hear from teachers is they work
| their fingers to the bone preparing lesson plans. I ask why
| are they making them from scratch, why not share? and don't
| get a response.
|
| > Every state, district, individual school might have its
| own rules about what can and must be taught, and teachers
| often aren't given much say in that.
|
| Then why do they say they spend all this effort creating
| lesson plans, not even re-using what they used last year?
| One teacher told me she spent her summer writing lesson
| plans for next year. I asked why she didn't re-use the ones
| she wrote for last year? She said they had to be custom
| made for each student. I asked how could she custom make
| them in the summer, when she didn't know which students
| she'd be getting in the fall?
|
| That was the end of that discussion.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Yes. My wife had dealt with this nonsense for years. She
| was ready to quit her school and the major negotiation
| point was reusing lessons from prior year. School finally
| relented.
| coryrc wrote:
| The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they
| teach the same class. One of the biggest values of
| seniority is being able to teach the same class every
| year.
|
| Why they don't standardize has everything to do with the
| kind of people who become teachers and what they want to
| be doing with their time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when
| they teach the same class.
|
| Of course they do. I knew I was being buffaloed.
|
| Though the point stands that why don't they share lesson
| plans? Why do we need 3.7 million unique lesson plans?
| There ought to be _plenty_ of off-the-shelf plans to use.
| mkingston wrote:
| Curriculum change is relatively frequent in some places.
| Different classes take to different material at different
| paces. Different resources are available to different
| schools and different classrooms (think science
| experiments). In the UK there are online platforms for
| purchasing and selling lesson plans. My partner has saved
| much time purchasing lesson plans from these platforms.
| They are available.
|
| Teachers aren't paid very well in many places and, at
| least here, funds aren't made specifically available for
| purchase of lesson plans; teachers spend their own money
| buying lesson plans. It's easily worth it when there's a
| second income in your household. Perhaps not in places
| where teachers are very poorly paid and for those who are
| on a single income.
| coryrc wrote:
| The teachers I know do start with standard lesson plans,
| but for reasons I don't understand they feel the need to
| customize them.
| caboteria wrote:
| NIH is a powerful sentiment in many areas, not just tech.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Here's a terrible example.
|
| Old textbooks used to use white names. Now, many schools are
| required to throw out prospective textbooks that don't have
| names representing multiple minorities.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Now, many schools are required to [x]
|
| In my experience, this is the sort of thing that, when un-
| cited often means "a school district somewhere had a
| proposed or implemented policy that, at its least in its
| least sympathetic interpretation, would require the school
| to do [x]" interpreted through a few layers of the outrage
| commentary telephone game.
| detaro wrote:
| Not all subjects have the luxury of being so isolated from
| changes in the real world.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I kept nearly all of my textbooks from college 40 years
| ago. None of them are outdated. They still fetch high
| prices used on Amazon.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Let's see. Science? Nope. History? Nope. Exercise? Nope.
| Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope.
|
| Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I have a bunch of EM textbooks from the 40s and 50s on my
| bookshelves, the field has changed quite a lot i.e. I
| understand what they are saying, but the mathematical
| formalism is very obtuse and the applications are often
| irrelevant outside of the very basics.
|
| The Feynman lectures were recorded prior to the standard
| model for example, still excellent but hopelessly out of
| date as an introduction to undergraduate physics in that
| particular area.
|
| Also, old textbooks that didn't make it to still being in
| print today may not be out of date but they may be bad
| pedagogy. A certain percent of everything is crap,
| textbooks are no different.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My high school didn't teach EM, nothing remotely that
| advanced.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I thought you meant all textbooks, my bad. If this is
| just about high school then I mostly agree wrt to the
| amount of waste.
|
| I think the solution would have to come down from the top
| however, in the UK at least the way our exams are marked
| means using an old textbook could be a fairly dangerous
| affair without an astute teacher (due to the ridiculously
| anal markschemes and philistine syllabus, this does bite
| people)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Most undergraduate textbooks are still fine. Though I
| agree that some topics change fast, like electronics
| beyond basic circuit analysis. Certainly comp-sci :-) Wow
| has that changed.
| detaro wrote:
| > _History?_
|
| Modern perspective on it is constantly evolving,
| especially on more recent bits, and there's plenty topics
| I'd rather have my kids being taught with a perspective
| from this century (E.g. to take my local German
| perspective, events surrounding WW2 and post-war
| development). Also, plenty things that happened while you
| were alive are _History_ now. (remember, kids _finishing_
| high school now weren 't born when 9/11 happened)
|
| > _Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages?
| Nope._
|
| Languages: Languages change (German literally added a
| letter in the past decade, new words are created, how
| people speak changes, ...). Language studies tend to be
| steeped in cultural aspects too, both for native and
| foreign languages (e.g. media literacy should probably
| cover internet material differently than it did when I
| was in high school, explaining the US media landscape in
| the English books probably also should look differently
| now). Being somewhat up-to-date with topics also helps
| students being interested.
|
| > _Science?_
|
| More stable, but also not frozen. Especially in biology
| and with medical topics you'll have changes, but other
| sciences too especially where discussing applications,
| but that's not as critical.
|
| Some more examples:
|
| Geography: If you'd given me 10 years old material in my
| first geography lessons even which country the lesson
| took place in would have been wrong.
|
| Any kind of thing that deals with
| law/demographics/economics/politics (how exactly that's
| divided up into different subjects very much depends on
| where you are, it often comes up in material for other
| subjects) will benefit from regular review and updates.
|
| A textbook being outdated doesn't mean the entire thing
| is useless now, often its just small sections that will
| stand out badly if not updated.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Languages: Languages change (German literally added a
| letter in the past decade, new words are created, how
| people speak changes, ...).
|
| If one learned German from a forty year old textbook the
| only problem related to that that you would experience in
| Germany would be that some people would think you were
| speaking rather more formally than expected. Learning it
| from an up to date text book isn't going to make you
| noticeably better at communicating with actual Germans in
| real life, that takes actual immersion in the language as
| it is really spoken.
|
| And the German language authorities might well have added
| a new letter or changed the spelling of the word
| _spagetti_ but that doesn 't mean that every German has.
|
| Textbooks are of very limited use in the real world.
| detaro wrote:
| Using a textbook with spellings that disagree with the
| dictionary in K-12 language education is going to be ...
| interesting. Not something you'd do if you can avoid it.
| And the bits talking about the GDR are going to be a bit
| out of place...
|
| Can you use outdated material? Sure, but that's different
| than pretending it isn't outdated or that outdated
| material can't get in the way.
| WalterBright wrote:
| For small sections, a pamphlet supplement would be all
| that's necessary, if that. The teacher can just say "that
| sentence is outdated, today we're pretty sure the
| dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid."
| pgalvin wrote:
| It is laughable to suggest that history does not change.
| Even studying history at the equivalent of high school
| had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the
| 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather
| our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving.
|
| I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > is constantly evolving
|
| Being an amateur historian myself, most of that smacks of
| political fashion. The (very) shallow view of history
| taught by K-12 doesn't need to change. The War of 1812
| hasn't moved to 1814 yet. Hitler still lost WW2. Edison
| still invented the first practical lightbulb, despite all
| the attempts to dethrone him :-)
| TchoBeer wrote:
| The war of 1812 ended in 1815
| WalterBright wrote:
| Things are usually named by when they start, not end.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Studying history formally isn't about memorising stuff
| you are interested in. I have a lot of sovietology books
| now, that doesn't make me a sovietologist because I don't
| consider myself able to really analyze the sources
| properly.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Teaching history is not about becoming a historian. Being
| a professional historian comes with it some standard
| practices and methods, which is irrelevant if you're not
| a pro. Though I have learned to not trust "history" books
| written by journalists, who usually write them because
| they have a political axe to grind.
|
| As for historical facts, you cannot understand history
| without knowing any facts about it. For example, you
| cannot understand the American Revolution without knowing
| who the major players were and some idea of what their
| roles were.
|
| BTW, I have an interest in Soviet history. I'm interested
| in your recommendations on the best books on the topic.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Foreign languages
|
| This reminds me of how Wheelock's Latin is _the_
| introductory Latin textbook. It 's 65 years old and still
| in use.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Well, Latin is an exception, being one of the "dead"
| languages (which no longer evolve).
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| It would be nice to have this thread as a "collection" place for
| different open textbooks. I personally use OpenStacks, they're
| quite good. https://openstax.org/
| miki123211 wrote:
| Openstax is the best source of extremely high-quality alt
| descriptions I've ever found.
|
| If you need inspiration for good alt descriptions of STEM /
| computer science / software engineering related images, just
| look at how Openstax does it. I'm a screen reader user myself
| and I'm very impressed.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The thing that disappoints me about Openstax is that, while
| they're free/libre, they don't seem to be open source anymore.
| They used to provide access to the raw XML (CNXML) used to
| generate the books, but I can't find that anywhere.
|
| It would be nice if there was something like OpenStax, maybe
| even a fork of it, that could be held in a Git repo and anyone
| could make pull requests.
| empyrical wrote:
| It looks like they're transitioning/have transitioned to
| editing the books with Google Docs:
|
| https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx
| myself248 wrote:
| This is my favorite text on electronics, open or otherwise:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/
|
| The explanation of impedance (volume II, chapter 14) was the
| first one that made intuitive sense to me, after struggling
| with the concept for years. The whole thing is beautiful, but
| that chapter especially.
| adolph wrote:
| There is a lot of knowledge where the world would benefit from a
| basic level of open ubiquity and the participation of experts who
| might be incented to contribute in a manner similar to Wikipedia.
|
| Here are two publishers releasing in the open:
|
| https://www.openintro.org/
|
| https://openstax.org/
| acabal wrote:
| Have you tried any epubs with MathML? If so how do they compare?
| 533474 wrote:
| When I publish my book, I will also publish the source. Knowledge
| is universal. Praise all the authors who release their sources.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I publish all my code these days as Open Source.
| gnicholas wrote:
| FYI, if you are a student with a 'qualifying print disability'
| (which includes visual impairment, dyslexia, and other learning
| disabilities), you may be able to get free access to hundreds of
| thousands of books/textbooks via Bookshare. [1]
|
| They get digital versions of books from the publishers and make
| them accessible to people with print disabilities. This means
| adding image descriptions and offering various text alterations
| (different text sizes, special fonts and colors, etc.) to make
| them easier to read. They also offer math-based tools to make
| equations accessible.
|
| Bookshare is 100% free to any US-based student who qualifies, and
| various other countries have agreements with Bookshare as well.
| They are part of the tech-for-good nonprofit Benetech and are
| based out of Palo Alto.
|
| 1: http://www.bookshare.org.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I had a student with limited vision in a class once, who had a
| reader. Luckily, I had written the course notes (basically a
| textbook) in latex.
|
| I consulted with the student and saw how the reader worked. All
| was fine, but it was slow because it said e.g. "backslash begin
| open brace equation close brace", so I made a perlscript to
| remove backslash and braces (and a few other things) and then it
| all worked really well.
|
| People, especially those who don't use mathematics much, think
| latex is hard for humans. I think exactly the reverse is true.
| gjvnq wrote:
| Basic scripting is such a powerful tool, it's sad that so few
| people know how to use it.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| This is pretty interesting. You should also consider cross-
| posting this request in other teaching communities, for example:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/matheducation/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceTeachers/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CSEducation/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/
| pbsds wrote:
| Could a equation OCR system like [1] be combined with a screen
| reader? It seems to support asciimath
|
| [1]: https://mathpix.com/ocr
| lightveil wrote:
| this looks interesting, and I think would be perfect for the
| kind of stuff I deal with. Unfortunately, the pricing looks
| less interesting (about $100 for a 1000 page pdf, if I'm
| reading it right, although possibly I could attempt to break
| the pdf up into pages which have the math). There was an older
| solution for this which costs about $200 as a whole.
|
| Stuff like this exists, and is possibly pretty reasonable
| monetarily, but not being in the U.S., exchange rates hit me
| hard.
|
| I've bookmarked this and will look into this more, though,
| thanks!
| [deleted]
| sodality2 wrote:
| We use openstax currently in our AP Biology class. It's
| incredible to not have to scroll through a scanned PDF for an
| obscure 2010 textbook. In addition, the questions that we are
| assigned are completely unique so I don't believe that this will
| contribute to the (very pervasive) problem of cheating.
|
| I donated to Openstax as well:
| https://riceconnect.rice.edu/donation/support-openstax
| pfortuny wrote:
| Oh, I had never thought about this. Thanks, shall see what I can
| do. I never thought the latex source would make any sense to
| anyone but me
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > thank you, thank you
|
| You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-)
|
| (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in
| improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has
| projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org.)
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| Just wanted to say my thanks as well, while I have not worked
| with one of your books, I have a lot of respect for people that
| choose to release the source of textbooks they created.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| You are welcome. Have a look at https://hefferon.net for the
| other books.
| lightveil wrote:
| Oh, that's very good to hear! I'll definitely get in contact. I
| won't be able to, for the next two months or so, but after that
| I should have some free time when I can test/contribute with
| code/whatever else is required. (Hopefully, if this gets done,
| publishers that use LaTeX for typesetting might automatically
| offer accessible PDFs as well.)
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Sometimes being a resource for developers, as someone who
| could be asked, can be valuable. Anyway, good luck with your
| studies!
| miki123211 wrote:
| Many books/websites let you view the Latex code, despite not
| technically being open source. If a website uses MathJax, you can
| change the renderer to "plain source" by opening the context menu
| on any math equation. "Paul's Math notes"[1] is a good example,
| and a really great free website for college-level math.
|
| If you're a screen reader user, the context menu may not open for
| reasons unknown. Try routing your mouse to the equation and
| simulate a right mouse click, that should do it. Moving your
| focus to the equation with the tab key may also be an option.
| Alternatively, you can just use Voice Over for MacOS, it can do
| it just fine.
| lightveil wrote:
| Yup, I have been using this extensively. Paul's notes are
| something I forgot to mention-I referred to them almost daily,
| back when I was taking the equivalent of Calculus 1, and
| they're still very useful now that I'm taking differential
| equations.
|
| Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work on OpenStax-I can't get
| LaTeX, all I can get is MathML, and that's not very easy to
| read. There's a way to navigate the math (using something
| called mathplayer), but it's quite inefficient as compared to
| LaTeX, specially as I go into higher math. The books are still
| very, very good, though.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Try playing with Mathjax's own accessibility settings. Not
| sure how well that works on Openstax, will work well if
| they're using Mathjax 3, badly otherwise.
|
| Alternatively play with MathPlayer's settings (in the control
| panel), some of the other reading modes work better in
| certain contexts.
|
| If you can, also try VoiceOver on the Mac, it has its own
| math support, which works pretty well.
|
| We seem to be in similar situations, if you want to share
| tips or something, my hn username at gmail dot com.
| enriquto wrote:
| not about the subjects that you mention, but if you ever need to
| learn probability and inference, this is easily among the best
| books on the subject:
| http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
|
| if you read the latex source, there are even some easter eggs in
| the comments
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