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To help me figure out what kind of job I am looking for and how I should go about getting a job at those places, I made a list of all the companies that I regularly use at least one of their products. After a while, I took a break to do some homework and reluctantly drew out my textbook and class notes. It hit me, right then and there, that one of the products I spend the most on every year is textbooks! I then knew my mission of the day, discover all that I could on why textbooks (the books assigned by educational instructors) were taking all of my money.

Throughout my research I focused on the set of textbooks I knew the most about, Computer Science and Information Technology. Traditionally I have not been very satisfied with my textbook offering in computer classes due to the book’s outrageous price per amount of useful information it contains. Its no doubt, difficult to write any type of book let alone one that is supposed to fill the big three qualifications: Easy to learn on your own with, easy to instruct with and makes a good reference. When I came to this realization I took a moment to think about how this could be accomplished. O’Reilly, the famed information technology book publisher, has accomplished these goals by keeping the books separate. The cookbooks are separate from the quick reference guides which are separate from the “Learning…” series. This no doubt gives the consumer greater choice on what they are after, and certainly gives O’Reilly a chance to pad their bottom line. But by separating this information into different books O’Reilly has limited their potential take advantage of the textbook market. And, as a result, of all of the O’Reilly books I have purchased, none have been for a college course.

O’Reilly has, recently, come to the rescue however. They have interested their new service (still in beta) Safari U. Safari U aims to be the academia arm of O’Reilly, but through different means than simply just textbook publication. This new system, is used by both professors and students. Professors, are able to use selections from books on the Safari Bookshelf (the online copies of books from a variety of publishers) to construct the textbook for their class. The professor can also add their own information, like word, powerpoint, or pdf files into the book to supplement the material. The price of the book is determined by the amount of pages in it (Each page is $0.16, so a 200 page book is $32).

Another Safari U feature is that, for a subscription fee, students can utilize an online syllabus and course information that the professor has created. The syllabus is created initially through the chapters in the book, but the professor can customize that with his or her own information. Finally, the most collaborative feature of Safari U is the Learning Objective Center. O’Reilly’s hypothesis is that since many courses are very similar between universities, instructors should be able to share their course information, such as custom book ideas or presentation slides, with other instructors to create better textbooks and help educate students.

I digress, despite O’Reilly’s new system textbooks currently still suck and as evident in the United States Government Accountability Office report on College Textbooks, the price of textbooks has risen 186% as opposed to 72% of overall price inflation. The GAO report attributes this to publishers adding electronic enhancements to the textbook such as CD-ROMS, course websites and teaching tools such as presentation slides. While publishers claim these aid student learning and help instructors teach, distribution centers (such as university bookstores) have reported that these items just make the books tougher to sell because of the higher cost and difficulty in selling them used. Most students aim to get their books purchased used because they are traditionally priced at 75% of the new book price, as opposed to 125% of a new copy (regular retail price + 25% markup by the bookstore). A bookstore charging a market to make a profit is nothing new, but since textbooks are regularly priced higher than most other books, the price quickly gets out of control.

Lets look at an example from one Ben Bernanke, President Bush’s nominee for Federal Reserve chairman and one time Princeton Professor. His co-authored book Principles of Economics is $100.75 for the hardcover, $116.56 for the DVD edition, and $40.75 for the study guide. I would regard those prices as typical of college textbooks (my economics textbook for this semester was $104.95 new. However, at the same retailer, Benanke’s 392 page Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience is $37.95. Now, surely Mr. Bernanke would be the first to point out that the demand for his textbook is significantly higher than that of his book on Inflation Targeting (which I imagine requires a fair amount of knowledge and interest in economics just to get through). The problem with this statement is not that the demand isn’t higher for the textbook (it is) but that students are forced into purchasing this book because it is assigned by the instructor. When an instructor selects a book, the student is normally not given a choice between several books, but between the same book new or used. Since the used books are kept in short supply, most students are not able to take advantage of that cost savings and are required to purchase the book new.

One of the other large complaints against publishers has been the frequency at which new editions are being published. Textbooks are updated on average about once every 3 years, but booksellers have noticed recently that textbooks are being updated more frequently. As the GAO report states, one of the things driving up costs is the introduction of new technology such as CD-ROMS, teach aids or companion websites. Its common practice for many publishers to push out new editions of their textbooks with an attached disk or website key. However, when the instructor tells the student that they need to have the latest edition, they may or may not know that the previous edition includes all of the same material except that it lacks the CD. In some programs, such as mathematics or some sciences, a book updated that frequently is not needed. It just causes students to pay more money, when in fact the information in the book did not need updated at all (In my statistics class, I used a book from the 1970s!). While in the information technology field it may be important to keep books up to date, I’m not sure i requires a new release of the book. A simple web page listing some important changes and some augmented material would do fine for most part (there really hasn’t been that much need to change the beginning C programming books, has their?). Finally, when books are updated, it is much more difficult for students to sell back books, if book sellers are informed that a new edition is coming out soon.

The internet has helped students out a lot, as it gives students the means to trade used books. While sites like EBay and Amazon Marketplace give places for students to trade books, the vast quantity of retailers on the internet give students another option of where to purchase their books. Most schools only have one or two bookstores around campus, so the fiercely competitive ecommerce sites offer students a much needed option. This past semester I ordered a book over Amazon Marketplace and it came from the same city that I go to school in (I got it significantly cheeper than the new book price and their were no used copies available at the bookstore).

So, I started with the quest to find out why my books were so expensive which was explained well the GAO report, learned about the new O’Reilly offering, and got to offer some of my complaints about the textbook publishing industry, I guess I could have been a little less verbose about it. Did it help me figure out where I want a job, I dunno. I am graduating in April, so I guess I really need to update my resume.

Lately, the wiki has become the must-have tool for any open source project. Some use it for a home page others use it for project ideas and organization, or just community documentation, no matter how its used, it has become a necessity for every open source project. However, I think its important to recognize that even though wiki’s have moved to the central location for project information, they are by no means the source of all the projects information. While project documentation and FAQ’s have steadily moved onto to the wiki, bug information, component (and project) status, and certain coding information has not been moved over.

First off, there are obvious questions of why any information should not be moved to a wiki. Wiki’s generally lock you into a data store (such as a MySQL) where more traditional text file documentation allows it to be moved in between storages, easily. Also, wiki’s are documented by a person free-form (for the most part) allowing for inconsistencies in formating (such as different heading sizes or styles, or a table on the right or left side of the page). Form input project aids, such as bugzilla, limit the formating problems as they greatly limit the amount of data the user can input and format the data for the user.
Despite these issues wiki’s are the fastest growing project aid around. By using a wiki, many barriers are broken down between a projects core developers and those new to the project. Anyone can in fact edit a wiki and offer their support to the project. This simple editing style, greatly reduces the barrier to updating a projects information. Wiki’s also bring the benefit of bringing lots of spread out information into a single place. Documentation that was traditionally done in code and then brought to the web with the likes of doxygen are constrained in their editing capabilities.

I’ll confess, at this time, that the reason I started thinking about this topic is because of something the Hula Project gets asked all the time. Whether it be on mailing lists, irc or even in person-to-person communication everyone wants to know what the status is. Some want to know the status of the entire project, others just a certain feature or even just of a bug. While some of this information might be available (what is the status of remaining bugs dealing with an OSX port?) others might be more complicated to define (is the AJAX interface usable yet?). Whatever the question, status is definitely of interest to the open source community, and it is important that projects outline their status on the website.

I think these status questions can better be answered through a powerful wiki built specifically to support such projects than it is done now. To correctly build a site that answers all of these questions, the site would have to break projects down into a set of components. Naturally, open source projects are broken down this way to allow developers to work on different parts, so it makes sense to take advantage of this. Each component should be given a wiki page (obviously a simple component template would be beneficial here), in which the following information could be defined: Component name, authors, current maintainer, who is working on it and what are they working on, status to next release, list of bugs associated with component, and documentation of that component. What makes the wiki great, is the simple fact that the text on it is written by a person, for people. If a note needs to be made about a certain detail, it can be inserted, by even those with little programming experience. I have included a crude example of what this could look like here.

Some of the new components would be better created if they were created as extensions than hardcoded. The following extensions will be aimed for Media Wiki as that is what I’m familiar with. The Component Status bar would work well as an extension as it could be made to look very nice and not burden the component page programmer. For example: <ComponentStatus level=”4″ />.

The Bugzilla and CVS/SVN extensions would be a little more complicated. Because most wiki’s cache the created page after editing, this information would have to be refreshed by the server every so often. Another option would be to have the wiki mirror the bugzilla or CVS/SVN XML and then us AJAX to pull down the information down live. This data could be organized nicely with DHTML allowing for a bugzilla table that shows just the first 5 bugs but gives the user the option for clicking for more, or even the ability to sort the table by any of the headings. For wiki syntax something like <Bugzilla component=”AJAX Interface” NumToList=”5″ />.

Documentation can likewise be separated and updated on a wiki. It would be great if a doxygen like application was able to be run and export to wiki format. I haven’t looked around but I have no doubt that this has been worked on by someone, somewhere.

In the end, what do I really want? Wiki Customization. Wiki’s are very customizable out of the box, but what I’ve found is that they aren’t perfect for every situation out of the box. One use of a wiki (one that a group of mine tried this semester) is as a means of group information sharing. When each person of a group needs to come up with a couple ideas, or just general brainstorming needs to happen between meetings, a wiki might make sense. However, wiki syntax can still seem archaic to some people, so why not have a ‘add item to list’ link at the bottom of each list. When you click on it, a textbox can show and you can add an item right to the list, e.g. Tada Lists.

Got back into town today after spending Thanksgiving at my parents. While I was there I did some reading, writing, eating, and sleeping. I even got to watch some football on TV, which doesn’t not happen often.

While away I read Freakonomics, the GAO report on College Textbooks and the beginnings of The Wisdom of Crowds.

I wrote about textbooks and Wiki Customization. I should have spent more time on job researching but this is what came out when I sat down in front of my laptop.

I went to see Capote at the State Theater in downtown Ann Arbor. It was an excellent film. I am glad I went to see it as it is not playing in Kalamazoo.

This week I have my senior design project presentation and final report due. I will have to begin studying for finals immidiatly, as my exams are next week. Because my studying for Buisness class has been pretty lackluster, I have put a plan in place to read all of my textbook in the course of one week. It boils down to reading 100 pages a day. Two days down, 5 to go. Anyone think I can make it?