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Comment by systems_glitch | Hacker News Reader

Virginia Military Institute's math department decided they'd solve it by just writing their own open source books:

https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematic...

My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around $350 in 2005 for the text we used for 1205/1206 at VT.

VMI also does outreach to help other schools adopt their books and transition from whatever they'd been using. Excellent use of public funds IMO.

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In my first year, our chemistry and physics professors both authored their own textbooks for their courses. It was in the days before copyleft and open source, but the physics prof ran a print shop in his backyard, hand-bound the textbooks and sold them to us at cost (which was about 10% of similar published books).

The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.

Yeah we had lab books like that at VT. Might as well have been a spiral bound notebook, the lab steps were often amended/replaced with a handout by the particular TA running the section.

Truly representing the best of what academia can offer right there. I thank your wife and the entirety of VMI for serving the public good, unlike those universities just paying lip service to it.

Thanks! I've let her know about the positive reception here. I get the impression that, although she likes doing the work and believes it's an essential cause, it's often thankless, especially outside VMI.

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