The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction.
Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.
Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.
Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.
> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.
I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.
Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.
Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.
"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.
Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.
The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.
That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.
Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.
I taught a remedial math class. There are thousands of books for such a topic. I was required by the university to use a specific new edition (something like 9th) from a specific publisher. I went to the university library and found the 2nd edition. The questions were more or less verbatim but in a different order. The lesson portions were more or less the same and tended to be better. I explicitly directed students to this edition, which they could purchase for something like 2$ (vs $150). In 10 years in post-highschool eduction, and 4 institutions, I never once heard or had a teacher do that. It's a choice and the majority of educators don't do it.
Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)
Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs
So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?
Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.
Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.
You should probably add /s for sarcasm. It's not very obvious.
I think it's more "laziness" btw. My algebra professor at university was famous for buying a 500 page stack of printer paper the last day of the term, putting it on his desk so he'd be frustrated with it, and after a week or so start writing next year's course. You got bonus points for finding mistakes in it, but there weren't many. The calculus course was the same.
The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free.
I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.
>I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own
Wikibooks exists to allow people to collaboratively write textbooks, so every professor doesn't have to write the entire book https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
I recall a university in canada had professors w=usi g their textbooks they authored but each edition was exxactly the same but they would change the quiz/assignment or exam questions so you had to buy it
on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it
its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it
then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear
it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now
Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point
Textbooks being expensive has nothing to do with the textbook. The textbook as an actual object of learning is irrelevant; a textbook is just a fee added on to the cost of the class that happens to come with a physical pile of bound paper that may or may not be useful. It's unfortunately a rather regressive fee that also generates a lot of landfill waste.
There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.
There need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good.
I tried writing a free textbook as an undergraduate. It's on quantum mechanics derived from first principles -- https://quantum.chaidhat.com -- hope you like it!
Buying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and booksellers have an incestuous relationship with education institutions and aggressively extract pounds of loan debt flesh from the student body.
Piracy?! What do I look like, an AI CEbro pillaging intellectual property for monopolistic commercial advantage without material consequence?!
For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.
They should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money.
And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.
You are assuming that the actual cost of a textbook on math which hasn't changed in centuries is hundreds of dollars per student per class when in actuality without the profit incentive a 100M could use the same ebook over a decade wherein the unit cost is almost too low to measured even if pay excellent folks to produce a new work.
I remember when the university where I worked made a big show out of moving to online textbooks. It was supposed to reduce the cost, reduce the need to lug books around, save trees, any rationale you could think of was thrown into the mix.
In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money.
I read this book cover to cover after purchasing it with money, despite it being free online, and loved it. I think it’s pretty clear that the author was in a position where they could afford to put this out there for free. But not everyone is and I think people should be compensated for their time and efforts if that’s what they want.
Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse).
I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.
The media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.
They know full and well they're unlikely to ever make money on there art so the protections such as they are aren't material. In fact their copyrights are often roundly ignored online with copies spreading freely a thing that's success for most of the people posting things for free!
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.
The Fortress of Doors blog had a good article on the history of flash game development. That article included an overview of the process, in which an explicitly-considered step was "after you upload your .swf file to the site that paid you to display their logo, every other site rips off the file and republishes it themselves".
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.
My relativity professor W. G. V. Rosser wrote a textbook on special relativity (An Introduction to The Theory of Relativity) which I very much doubt paid him back enough in royalties to compensate him for the time it took to write and also to issue revised editions.
It seems unlikely to me that he ever bothered to think about copyright
The most basic incentive is for the fun of it. There are plenty of people who publish stuff without hoping to get directly compensated for it. Even otherwise, ideas have a nasty habit of breaking free from the first authors, specially without laws to prevent such.
Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought.
In regards to countries with weaker copyright enforcement, I think there's a bit of an inversion. Most countries that fail to properly enforce copyright do so due to a lot of structural issues, which also hamper creative thinking for independent reasons. China would be an example of a country with weaker copyright enforcement but also with good infrastructure, and it seems to be overtaking (if it already didn't) the US in terms of creative production (both for copyright and patents).
> Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers.
That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which cannot be sold, but only licensed.”
Interesting for a later search, but moral rights aren't about compensation though:
> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
- In Shakespeare's day, the physical ordeal of setting type, printing, binding, etc. were a non-trivial moat against copying of printed works. Not so now.
- Shakespeare was closely associated with London theaters and companies of actors. Selling tickets for performances (of plays he'd written) was a far better way to make money than trying to sell scripts.
same reason so many people contribute for free to open source projects, I imagine. Same reason tons of musicians put out music for free online as well. Both successful and amateur alike at that.
I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.
> Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated?
Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?
I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.
Copyright term kept getting extended. Copyright was a controversial concept when it got baked into the US constitution. But the enabling laws have run off the rails, mainly due to corporate lobbying. Copyright has also been reinterpreted as a property right, when it's really a government granted limited term monopoly. Another case of the government being bought out from under the people.
> the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
I know the argument from the late 1700s that having copyright wouldn't necessarily lead to higher quality works of literature, music, etc.
But I've never heard the argument that getting rid of copyright would actually lead to higher quality published works. What's the evidence or even reasoning for that claim here in 2026?
Edit: added here in 2026 because, on reflection, I'm not asking about historical arguments; though they may be interesting, I'm curious about what's relevant in the time of social media and LLMs.
Any work worth consuming must be a labor of love. Current copyright prohibits people who love newer works from building off of them. I certainly would still advocate for strong anti-fraud laws (you can't claim a work as your own if it's copied or derivative, but you could still distribute or edit it or build off it with attribution). But if an idea or piece of art is worth sharing with the world, it is worth building upon, discussing, sharing, and editing by anyone else who is inspired by it.
In 2026, environments with loose copyright enforcement (social media, online artists, video creation, remixers/editors, etc) are seeing a wealth of creative output. Promising artists who are not independently wealthy are supported from the bottom up (patreon, merch sales) and/or the top down (commissions, sponsorships), and they are happy if people share their work because compensation does work outside the traditional copyright-controlled distribution channels.
This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.
In our system, the university libraries filled 90% of our textbook needs. Some books were highly sought after, especially physics and calculus, which were common for all STEM majors.
In those cases, we would run to the library first thing to get the books. If you missed out, someone would give you the PDF.
Professors would email the reading list before the first class with their recommendations, and even tell the students which libraries had each book. Other professors would have their notes and handbooks available on the website, and have some of the copy shops sell them for the cost of printing.
When I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also <wink-wink nudge-nudged> about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class".
I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.
It always annoyed me that I'm paying thousands of dollars for tuition, only to be forced to pay additional thousands for the university-specific version of a textbook.
I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder.
Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems.
Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course.
I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it.
ETA:
I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.
I'm glad to hear that, I just ordered their astronomy book the other day! The online/PDF material looked good but I hate diving into something unless it's on paper.
> I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student
The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.
The university textbook market is pathological and unfair. At every turn the publishers , and the universities happily go along with it.
It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find.
To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out.
I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition.
At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around.
There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book.
When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated.
The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise.
One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.
Then students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.
The colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.
If someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.
The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction.
Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.
Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.
Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers.
You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia.
Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.
Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.
> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.
I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.
Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.
Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.
I've taught about 10 or 12 different courses. I only have one course in which I require a textbook, and it can be found for about 20 bucks.
"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.
Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.
The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.
That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.
Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.
And the majority of people I work with DON'T.
If that's the case, by what mechanism are publishers forcing your students to buy books with a single-use access code?
I taught a remedial math class. There are thousands of books for such a topic. I was required by the university to use a specific new edition (something like 9th) from a specific publisher. I went to the university library and found the 2nd edition. The questions were more or less verbatim but in a different order. The lesson portions were more or less the same and tended to be better. I explicitly directed students to this edition, which they could purchase for something like 2$ (vs $150). In 10 years in post-highschool eduction, and 4 institutions, I never once heard or had a teacher do that. It's a choice and the majority of educators don't do it.
Tip for learners: find an early edition of a book. They're often vastly cheaper and much better written. It stands that if a book warrants a 12th edition, then the 1st edition must have been decent enough to get wide adoption. Often revisions are bloat or, when they're not, it's educational to see the difference between then and now (eg Andre Tanenbaum's OS books)
Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs
So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?
Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.
Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.
Why not choose different books? For most subjects, why not old books or wikibooks?
Because Calculus, Newtonian Mechanics, etc., has changed dramatically since 50 years ago.
LOL.
You should probably add /s for sarcasm. It's not very obvious.
I think it's more "laziness" btw. My algebra professor at university was famous for buying a 500 page stack of printer paper the last day of the term, putting it on his desk so he'd be frustrated with it, and after a week or so start writing next year's course. You got bonus points for finding mistakes in it, but there weren't many. The calculus course was the same.
Big fan of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces and the accompanying lectures (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/537/Spring2018/Disc...).
Free, high quality learning materials like this are an absolute treasure, and without them, I wouldn't be where I am in my career today.
Used that book in OS classes, absolutely loved it.
The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free.
I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.
Some more free ones:
Abstract Algebra by Judson - https://judsonbooks.org/abstract-algebra-theory-and-applicat...
Linear Algebra by Hefferon - https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/
Real Analysis by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/ra/
Differential Equations by Lebl - https://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
These should be enough to give you a first and second year undergrad level education in mathematics (minus stats&probability).
>I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own
Wikibooks exists to allow people to collaboratively write textbooks, so every professor doesn't have to write the entire book https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
I recall a university in canada had professors w=usi g their textbooks they authored but each edition was exxactly the same but they would change the quiz/assignment or exam questions so you had to buy it
on top of that we had to purchase a weird accessory to answer questions electronically instead of raising hands and he was a beneficiary of the company that built it
its so corrupt these textbooks were very expensive but we use like 1% of it
then bunch of students started photocopying and selling it at 95% discount and they got arrested with full on SWAT gear
it made me question the whole higher education thing i certainly do not encourage it anymore especially with LLMs now
Unless you plan on engineering, law, medicine, actuary i just dont see the point
I've much respect for the Russian trend of Samizdat/Libgen/Shadow Libraries
Textbooks being expensive has nothing to do with the textbook. The textbook as an actual object of learning is irrelevant; a textbook is just a fee added on to the cost of the class that happens to come with a physical pile of bound paper that may or may not be useful. It's unfortunately a rather regressive fee that also generates a lot of landfill waste.
There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.
There need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good.
Two notable efforts:
- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
- https://www.motionmountain.net/
as well as arguably the influential: https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
of course, in addition to crowd-sourced efforts at more traditional media:
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://librivox.org/
- https://standardebooks.org/
- https://www.wikibooks.org/
as well as an entire category of Computer Science texts/programs published as books:
- http://literateprogramming.com/
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
The think link should be:
https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkPython/
I tried writing a free textbook as an undergraduate. It's on quantum mechanics derived from first principles -- https://quantum.chaidhat.com -- hope you like it!
Buying used global editions from the international students is the move for undergrads at big schools. Hardcover binding and color print were not missed and definitely not worth 10-20x more. Even published lecturers would ask students to fetch a "course pack" compilation of sloppy photocopied excerpts for purchase by on-campus print operations. Somehow this wasn't piracy. It is no secret that publishers and booksellers have an incestuous relationship with education institutions and aggressively extract pounds of loan debt flesh from the student body.
Wiley actually tried to abuse copyright law to prohibit import and sale of international textbooks. They fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and (thankfully) lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
Nah, better to just pirate them and save your back.
Piracy?! What do I look like, an AI CEbro pillaging intellectual property for monopolistic commercial advantage without material consequence?!
For a time, course packs were the piracy of convenience because a PDFs with well-meaning but unreliable OCR were loaded with images (charting etc) resulting in large, difficult to navigate files even at the most eye watering, illegible compression.
They should at least be free through the university, given the insane prices students paying for tuition now. Maybe it could be sold for money to those not actually attending a course on a subject, but I hear of far too many examples where it seems the lecturer/professor is basically using the students as a secondary way of making money.
And the online setup is arguably even better for the reasons noted. Perhaps in that case, paying could be something you do if you want a hard copy of the book to peruse without a computer/mobile device.
Perhaps you fail to see how this would probably lead to textbooks costing even more and which will be directly passed to students as higher tuition?
You are assuming that the actual cost of a textbook on math which hasn't changed in centuries is hundreds of dollars per student per class when in actuality without the profit incentive a 100M could use the same ebook over a decade wherein the unit cost is almost too low to measured even if pay excellent folks to produce a new work.
I remember when the university where I worked made a big show out of moving to online textbooks. It was supposed to reduce the cost, reduce the need to lug books around, save trees, any rationale you could think of was thrown into the mix.
In the end, books didn't get any cheaper. E-books cost about the same as renting a paper textbook for the term, the DRM protection was cumbersome, if you had to go online the websites were slow. They just didn't solve any real problems, and didn't save much money.
In fact printed books are still widely used.
I read this book cover to cover after purchasing it with money, despite it being free online, and loved it. I think it’s pretty clear that the author was in a position where they could afford to put this out there for free. But not everyone is and I think people should be compensated for their time and efforts if that’s what they want.
Introduction to Statistical Thinking (With R, Without Calculus) by Yakir is pretty cool.
https://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msby/StatThink/
Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse).
I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.
The media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.
They know full and well they're unlikely to ever make money on there art so the protections such as they are aren't material. In fact their copyrights are often roundly ignored online with copies spreading freely a thing that's success for most of the people posting things for free!
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.
The Fortress of Doors blog had a good article on the history of flash game development. That article included an overview of the process, in which an explicitly-considered step was "after you upload your .swf file to the site that paid you to display their logo, every other site rips off the file and republishes it themselves".
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.
My relativity professor W. G. V. Rosser wrote a textbook on special relativity (An Introduction to The Theory of Relativity) which I very much doubt paid him back enough in royalties to compensate him for the time it took to write and also to issue revised editions.
It seems unlikely to me that he ever bothered to think about copyright
The most basic incentive is for the fun of it. There are plenty of people who publish stuff without hoping to get directly compensated for it. Even otherwise, ideas have a nasty habit of breaking free from the first authors, specially without laws to prevent such.
Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought.
In regards to countries with weaker copyright enforcement, I think there's a bit of an inversion. Most countries that fail to properly enforce copyright do so due to a lot of structural issues, which also hamper creative thinking for independent reasons. China would be an example of a country with weaker copyright enforcement but also with good infrastructure, and it seems to be overtaking (if it already didn't) the US in terms of creative production (both for copyright and patents).
> Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers.
That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which cannot be sold, but only licensed.”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
Interesting for a later search, but moral rights aren't about compensation though:
> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
Also from [0]
Copyright didn't exist when Shakespeare was alive, clearly there was no incentive for him to write.
Disagree:
- In Shakespeare's day, the physical ordeal of setting type, printing, binding, etc. were a non-trivial moat against copying of printed works. Not so now.
- Shakespeare was closely associated with London theaters and companies of actors. Selling tickets for performances (of plays he'd written) was a far better way to make money than trying to sell scripts.
same reason so many people contribute for free to open source projects, I imagine. Same reason tons of musicians put out music for free online as well. Both successful and amateur alike at that.
I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.
> Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated?
Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?
I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.
Copyright term kept getting extended. Copyright was a controversial concept when it got baked into the US constitution. But the enabling laws have run off the rails, mainly due to corporate lobbying. Copyright has also been reinterpreted as a property right, when it's really a government granted limited term monopoly. Another case of the government being bought out from under the people.
> the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
I know the argument from the late 1700s that having copyright wouldn't necessarily lead to higher quality works of literature, music, etc.
But I've never heard the argument that getting rid of copyright would actually lead to higher quality published works. What's the evidence or even reasoning for that claim here in 2026?
Edit: added here in 2026 because, on reflection, I'm not asking about historical arguments; though they may be interesting, I'm curious about what's relevant in the time of social media and LLMs.
Any work worth consuming must be a labor of love. Current copyright prohibits people who love newer works from building off of them. I certainly would still advocate for strong anti-fraud laws (you can't claim a work as your own if it's copied or derivative, but you could still distribute or edit it or build off it with attribution). But if an idea or piece of art is worth sharing with the world, it is worth building upon, discussing, sharing, and editing by anyone else who is inspired by it.
In 2026, environments with loose copyright enforcement (social media, online artists, video creation, remixers/editors, etc) are seeing a wealth of creative output. Promising artists who are not independently wealthy are supported from the bottom up (patreon, merch sales) and/or the top down (commissions, sponsorships), and they are happy if people share their work because compensation does work outside the traditional copyright-controlled distribution channels.
“Everything except what I do should be free to me.”
Remember that you can make your own textbook (and accompanying materials) using your own money and time whenever you want!
Right. Just use the LLM to generate it for you /s
"We required the students to buy the book"
This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.
In our system, the university libraries filled 90% of our textbook needs. Some books were highly sought after, especially physics and calculus, which were common for all STEM majors.
In those cases, we would run to the library first thing to get the books. If you missed out, someone would give you the PDF.
Professors would email the reading list before the first class with their recommendations, and even tell the students which libraries had each book. Other professors would have their notes and handbooks available on the website, and have some of the copy shops sell them for the cost of printing.
Hey, this guy taught me Operating Systems! He was a great lecturer despite his own preference for book learning :-)
Completely agree with the sentiment of the article.
Also Remzi is a fantastic teacher. Really enjoyed being in his lectures.
Why can't students buy one and then make like 20 copies?
When I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also <wink-wink nudge-nudged> about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class".
I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.
Soon AI should be good enough to create a correct textbook.
considering anna's archive exists, they already are?
It always annoyed me that I'm paying thousands of dollars for tuition, only to be forced to pay additional thousands for the university-specific version of a textbook.
I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder.
Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems.
Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course.
I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it.
ETA:
I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.
I've heard good things about openstax.
I used several of their books in school. Each of them was top notch.
Hell, their math books are better than the paid books I used.
I'm glad to hear that, I just ordered their astronomy book the other day! The online/PDF material looked good but I hate diving into something unless it's on paper.
I've seen a couple printed books from them. They all seemed to be a pretty good quality print.
OSTEP is genuinely one of the best OS resources out there. Hard to argue textbooks should be behind a paywall when the free version is this good.
I've always wondered why this case hasn't been made more obviously.
Like, the entire point of a library is not "to provide a limited number of books."
There are existing free textbook publishing organizations. From a satisfied consumer point of view: https://openintro.org/ and https://openstax.org/.
> I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student
The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.
The university textbook market is pathological and unfair. At every turn the publishers , and the universities happily go along with it.
It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find.
To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out.
I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition.
At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around.
There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book.
When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated.
The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise.
One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.
Everything should be free. The people writing the textbooks should spend 5 years of their life working on it for free.
They should get paid. The press should pay them. The college pays the press. The students pay the college. The press releases information for free.
Then students will just end up paying more in tuition, possibly more than the costs of textbooks. That extra money of course will go to increasing either/both the university president's or lead football coach's salaries.
The colleges will raise tuition anyways, and they do it at a runaway cost. Might as well throw in something useful and tangible like textbooks that they can bargain wholesale with the publishers. Individually, the students can only beg.
So you're saying colleges will just increase tuition to cover the cost of textbooks right?
Or they could lay off some middle managers. If they blame the layoffs on AI the market might even reward them for it.
The market will reward colleges for layoffs?
And what, use the historically fabulously successful flat model?
The authors are "the press". So they somehow pay themselves?
if everything really was free then the textbook writers wouldn't need compensation since everything would be free for them too
The point of most complaints is that the author isn't the one enjoying the profit from textbooks.
If someone spent 5 years of their life ruining Euler's arrangement of calculus concepts that we've been using for the last 250 years then they don't deserve money.