Free MIT Engineering Text For Download 207
An anonymous reader writes " The (sci-tech) Library Question is reporting, "The third edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook, written by John H Lienhard V (MIT) and John H Lienhard IV (U Houston), has been made available on the web. The book is an introduction to heat transfer, geared towards engineering students. It may be downloaded free of charge. The authors explain:
We are placing a mechanical engineering textbook into an electronic format for worldwide, no-charge distribution. The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away. Two potential benefits should accrue from doing this. First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle). Second, free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce."
Good Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Another thing, will schools then start supplying laptops or tablet PC's to view these text books on while in class?
Assuming some honesty... (Score:5, Interesting)
With some engineering and science -related courses suffering from low levels of interest, a wider availability of resources could (as the article suggests) draw out those who aren't applying for financial reasons, whilst giving others a taste of subjects and their potential uses in picking a career path and making a difference. After all, most people have felt they've had a good idea or two at some time or other... many have been discouraged only by the lack of readily available background knowledge.
Yay for more open learning!
When can we start (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, one of the big issues in textbook publication is that the information included sometimes can be determined by what state publishes the text - this is especially true in history and biology, both of which are full of political dynamite.
Maybe eventually this will lead to a freer exchange of information.
Re:beneficial in more ways than one (Score:3, Interesting)
More online books? Better for humans? (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, Michael Faraday, received very little education. Everything he learned was from books that came to him as a bookbinder. Now lets say, he newer became a bookbinder. What would have happened? Wonderfull mind would not have been used for what it was used.
Thats a great example, when right people get their hands on books which are in interest of them wonderfull things can happen.
I hope we will see more online books. Now the education will be available pretty much to everyone who has access to a computer. Not only those who's parents rich, can afford them to send to best colleges in the world.
Anyone aggree with me? or see my point?
Re:Great idea, let's expand it. (Score:4, Interesting)
in my courses (physics) the point of lectures is to obtain a set of notes good enough to work completely on their own in most cases. questions and answers are also provided by lecturers.
without wanting to sound like a flame or anything, is it possible that in the US lecturers just can't be bothered or aren't given the resources to teach their pupils properly and so fall back on textbooks which the money-grabbing publishers are happy to exploit (I've heard tales of unnecessary book-CD bundles etc. all just to inflate prices).
Re:Great idea, let's expand it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Philip Greenspun [greenspun.com], writing about his book Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing [greenspun.com]
Re:Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
A well regarded and published professor is money in the bank for a university.
A professor who "pens" a text that becomes one of _the_ texts in his field
can elevate his university's stature tremendously. Imagine if we cut out the
middleman. A university handles the electronic pulishing duties.
In your case the text becomes "The cperciva Text." It can be updated
indefinitely. Continuous peer review. Continuous contributions
from that university's professors forever.
I'm not going to propose the details for an entire compensation system.
It is way too early in the morning for that. I think though, that the lessening
of text costs would only be one of many benefits. Dynamic texts could change many things.
Even better... (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why I wrote two free web books (Score:3, Interesting)
I would occasionally get emails from people teaching classes to students who no-way could afford to buy my books (usually in 3rd world countries). These teachers would ask for permission to copy a few chapters for class distribution - something that I did not have the right to do.
My solution to this problem was to write 2 free web books using a Creative Commons license (I was the featured commoner about a year ago).
I still write books for publication, but to be honest, writing free books under a CC license is way more satisfying.
-Mark
Good start, but we need GPL multimedia textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
It was our idea that we should start with an introductory physics text, say, basic mechanics. The ultimate product would be an .iso disk image which contains not only a textbook, but recordings of key lectures, some highly compressed video and simulations of certain experiments, perhaps rendered in a GPL 3D graphics engine (where physical principles would be programmed in, and students could manipulate the setup and observe realistic changes in the results).
This would be a large and publicised project, and one that could/should attract enough NSF funding to cover its modest costs. (I've seen the NSF give money to much more frivolous ideas!) The initial text might be a "donation" from a cooperating professor, and the audio/video lecture fragments would also be solicited recorded in the classrooms of truly excellent faculty. (Nobody I talked to about this said he/she would refuse.) The various programs and simulations that need to be written would come from contracted, qualified and paid programmers and graduate students. (And perhaps volunteers.) All their code would be GPL.
Once the project gets going, a working group, organized much like an editorial board, would solicit and review new submissions and alterations. There can be arbitrarily many exercise problems, as well as detailed explanations of their solutions.
These would fully take advantage of the digital format. One weakness of paper textbooks is that by their nature, they have space for only a few fully-solved and explained sample exercises. This would not be a limitation of an electronic text. In fact, how to solve an exercise could be explained in several different ways by different instructors, maximizing the chance the student would "get it". I imagine an interface where next to each step, there is a small "how does this follow?" button. If pressed, it opens a small window describing the motivation of a certain transition.
Many of these details and elaborations could be contributed by users of the textbook. Like any major software project, there would be a moderated online forum to discuss issues related to the textbook. Ultimate decisions about how the text should be updated (the regular "distributions" of the GPL material) would be made by the editorial board. In academia many professors participate in editing journals pro bono, and we could expect something similar here. Feedback on the various aspects of the text would be solicited directly from students and instructors, and the editorial board would post "requests for updates" with specific issues that need to be addressed to make the project a better learning tool.
Well, we thought about many more details of implementation, but they are boring and you guys might have better ideas anyway. The point of the whole project would be primarily to have a supplement to introductory college-level classes, but the uses go far beyond that. The textbook would be designed to be self-learner friendly, something a motivated high-school student could easily work through. It could be duplicated cheaply and en masse (at first it would be a set of CD-ROMS, eventually transitioning to DVD-ROMS). In places where poverty, georgaphy and cultural factors limit access to higher education (which includes parts of the USA), people will still have simple computers and can cover the $2 for a burned DVD-ROM.
Of course, the idea would be to get one "hit" textbook and then reuse the software and other infrastructure to make more. Not only would this textbook require sequels, but also a demand for a calculus textbook in the same format. These are ideal fields for getting the project rolling, because introductory math, physics and chemistry textbooks don't get obsolete very quickly. How this project would be paid for re
Open publishing may reduce prices of textbooks (Score:1, Interesting)
a leg. Whereas in India for e.g, textbooks are
relatively quite cheap. Since textbooks there are
published in English, and many of them are of
equivalent quality -- I have seen my University
Electronics design textbook -- in a local library
here, if open publishing of textbooks takes off,
the following benefits could occur:
1. Bring down the cost of printed textbooks to a much more affordable level.
2. Give exposure to authors outside of the US.
3. Raise the overall quality of books because of
more competition.
4. Students of other poor countries have cheap
access to US books and similarly US students have
easy access to books published outside of the US
-- getting a whole new perspective, so to speak.
5. Open text books even if not published in
English, may be partially machine translated and
partially by volunteer effort -- a la HOWTO's and
open source docs today -- reaching a much larger
audience than the original native edition.
6. Monopoly of big and expensive publishing houses
is broken.
7. We might see quotations in books from non
English speaking countries
seeing authors repeatedly quote Shakespeare and
other Anglo-Saxon authors or stuff like baseball
and other US games in books which no one outside
the US really cares for.
Re:posting textbooks (Score:2, Interesting)
I've written some open-source physics textbooks [lightandmatter.com] that have been adopted at eighteen schools. Not trying to blow my own horn -- I just wanted to provide a counterexample.
Re:Noble Effort (Score:3, Interesting)
The publishers, on the other hand do not provide the typical services that justify their share of the profit; promotion of the books is non-existant. When distribution is all they are left with, where do they add value?
My biggest gripes with the hard-copy texts is that (a) they cost so much you have an incentive to sell them at the end of the class, and (b) they are so darn heavy that every time you move you have to consider if you really want to keep them.
I think it would be great if a school would publish a DVD with all required texts for a "reasonable" price of $100. It can still help fund the writing efforts to a small degree, and give something tangible to students (and alums if they really made something good!).
Free Biomedical Library (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good start, but we need GPL multimedia textbook (Score:5, Interesting)
The software we developed (I was the programmer on the project) was used for several classes on campus at Utah State University [usu.edu], where the project was based from, under the direction of Dr. R. Kent Wood (he has since retired). Our primary emphasis was more toward K-12 learning, but it proved to be quite popular with several computer-based learning groups including C.A.L.I.C.O [calico.org], a group of individuals working on acquiring forign language skills through computer-based learning.
There are several issues that need to be dealt with in regards to multimedia development. Some of them have been solved compared to what I was dealing with in the past, but some still are huge problems:
Re:Incentive (Score:3, Interesting)
Some universities have better funding than others. Those that have good funding may allow their professors to write textbooks. Those that do not, either will have to skip writing textbooks, or have to find extra funding.
The profits an author gets from writing a textbook are (a) fame, (b) good course material, (c) a chance to be recognised as the top specialist in the field, (d) if very lucky, a bit of money on the side. Unfortunately, where I live an author is never allowed to keep the money for himself; it all has to go to the university. But, for me, if the university does allright, I do allright.
The other extreme at the University of Texas (Score:2, Interesting)