Flexbooks – a Non-Braindead way to produce textbooks
I’ve just seen a post on Flexbooks, an initiative of CK-12 so headed over to have a look. I believe initiatives of this kind are extremely important. Because copyright makes the price of textbooks too high, copyright is a significant barrier to education. A poorly educated workforce is a lower production workforce. In short, copyright ideology substantially lowers GDP. Well, no more. The Flexbooks initiative aims to provide textbooks for K-12 under the CC-BY-SA licence. The obnoxious (and anti-social) ‘-NC’ is absent. Thank heavens these are enlightened educators!
I have downloaded their 400+ page book on calculus and, after a quick flip, it seems appropriate for a late secondary school course. In criticism, the typesetting of equations is a bit wonky (and given the long standing availability of LaTeX this seems very mysterious), some diagrams could be improved, the book lacks a preface, appendicies and an index, and they seem to assume that student have a particular make/model of scientific calculator. Much of the demonstration information relating to the site is in Flash, so they’re not entirely enlightened.
Downloading and distributing for free is not even half the story. As the licence is SA, everyone is free to make changes to them – say farewell to the days of textbooks with US-specific references or out of date pricing. Does the example in the text book refer to buying a penny white loaf at Banbury Cross? Why, then change it to $2:00 wholemeal loaf in Sydney, a $3.80 milkshake at Ettalong Beach (for school children in that area) or even something from the tuckshop of the specific school it’s used in. If there is something wrong with a chapter, take it out and replace it with a better chapter. Over time such books will reach optimal quality – perhaps even in the absence of structured review (in that bad variants will be less used by teachers).
You don’t even need to change the textbooks to see the added value. The fact that they’re electronic means you don’t need to print them or, if you do, you can print them in a size and format which suits you. If you think the idea of kids lugging 400 pages of text book to and from school every day isn’t a good one, print them out in smaller parts, one for each term.
This kind of initiative is exactly the kind of initiative that Government should be directing stimulus money to.
Brendan Scott's Weblog 
CK-12 will be rolling out LaTex books next month. Neeru Khosla just announced it on her blog http://about.ck12.org/blog
Thanks Emily
The LaTeX version looks much better.
this is another example of a text-book. This one is from india (state of kerela). It’s produced using latex. The website leaves a lot to be done. All chapters point to the same pdf file.
http://www.education.kerala.gov.in/eng_maths.htm
When the first Kindle came out, the first thing I thought was: “It will be awesome when readers are open source and educational books are free and open as well.” I’m very happy to watch the beginning of the change.
One of the biggest threats to a peaceful world and shift out of poverty is education. This will become the primary weapon of the war against poverty and conflict.
Excuse me… the threat to peace and poverty is a lack of education.
Excuse me…
The lack of education is a threat to peace, but not poverty.
Though education (and not lack of it) might very well be a threat to poverty.
i like the fact that it costs not a penny more for color. in my school days, textbooks always cost more if they had color plates. now every page can be in color. and you hardly need a highlighter pen, since everything is already colorfully emphasized with color, not to mention hypertext.