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Textbook publishing

I have previously written about text books, their tendency to be rather pricey despite that they are not exactly profitable to the author.

Since writing a text book is never going to make me rich, if ever I do I think it will be an open source book available online.

Yes, I know that a publisher brings a lot of good to a manuscript, like careful review and typesetting etc. but I would think that if the book is received well and available for free, I will get similar feedback from users.

Anyway, one serious drawback from this approach is that downloading a PDF just isn’t the same as buying a proper book that you can bring to the beach to read in the summer and that you can add notes in the margin and such.  Yes yes, I know I can annotate a PDF but it is no where as easy as a printed book.

So I was very excited to see this approach for text books: free books online and cheap printed versions.

That is surely the way to go for textbooks!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Textbook publishing”

  1. mikaelhc Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 7:44 am

    Flatworld Knowledge seem to charge for their PDF copies ($20 for the ones i tried). That would be a showstopper for many people.

  2. Thomas Mailund Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 8:07 am

    Their webpage says:

    You choose how you want your book. How novel. Read online for free or buy an affordable offline version. Check out your choices on the class page. Tip: Best Deal packages are, well, your best deal.

    …but true, I haven’t actually been able to find a PDF that I could download.

  3. Thomas Widmann Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 11:47 am

    If it works for the company, that’s great. Personally, I’m a bit pessimistic whether it’ll survive once e-book readers become commonplace.
    As an alternative, you could of course just publish your text book on Lulu.

  4. Thomas Mailund Says:
    August 25th, 2009 at 11:52 am

    Well, maybe once e-paper becomes commonplace :) e-book readers, those I have tried at least, are far from as nice as a real book imho

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