“Text Me”

Ptobias has sent me a link regarding an Economics Professor at CalTech is fed up with students having to buy lacklustre, overpriced textbooks. The Professor, R. Preston McAfee, is going to publish his own online, open source textbook. I fully support making textbooks available to students at a much cheaper price; the previous federal government removed a textbook subsidy of (I think) 5% and while it’s not a massive discount, it’s still welcome. With universities like MIT putting their courses online for free (and often under Creative Commons licenses if not in the public domain), perhaps we can start to see a dent made in the outlay for students each semester.

Let’s face it, the average textbook is prescribed for one, maybe two units. Having to spend A$100 on a single use textbook which will weigh down a bookshelf is completely ridiculous.  Prescribed textbooks for a subject may change from one year to the next or a new edition may be published; in this event, the resale value for a prescribed textbook will drop dramatically, not to mention the demand for it.

If this sounds like some pie in the sky, socialist, utopian dream of a radical left-wing professor who wants to smash the capitalist state, think again. McAfee describes himself as a “right-wing economist” and has won praise from other economists such as co-author of Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt.

While there exist online versions of textbooks and exercise sheets, it is often the case (as with Wiley Publishing and their “Mastering Physics” project) that the expensive, printed version of the textbook must be bought in order to gain access. The lower marginal costs involved in producing an online copy mean that publishers are starting to move towards online provision of material, rather than printing and shipping tome after tome (which will also benefit the environment rather than just students and publishers). For professors like McAfee, though, it’s still not enough. Frustrated with the low quality textbooks being produced by major publishing companies, McAfee believes that he can do a better job and wants to share the fruits of his labour with his students and others to overcome the lack of dissemination of knowledge.