Open Text Book

Electronics textbooks and Q&A sheets

These are both from Tony R. Kuphaldt, industrial electronics instructor at Bellingham Technical College, Washington:

• Lessons In Electric Circuits. A series of textbooks about electricity and electronics. Available under a Design Science License (DSL).
• Socratic Electronics. A large number of question and answer sheets about electronics. Available under a Creative Commons – Attribution license (BY)

Leave a Comment June 26, 2007

A few open physics textbooks

Here they are…

• The Light and Matter series of physics textbooks by Ben Crowell (Fullerton College, CA) is used by a number of American schools, colleges and universities. Available under Creative Commons – Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA). Ben also runs The Assayer – a listing of free books with user reviews.
• Calculus-Based Physics by Jeffrey W. Schnick (Saint Anselm College). Creative Commons – Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA).
• A Radically Modern Approach to Freshman Physics by David J. Raymond (New Mexico Tech). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

4 Comments June 24, 2007

Some open maths textbooks

I’ve just been looking through a couple of quite large listings of maths textbooks: Textbooks in Mathematics by Alex Stefanov at the ICTP (mirrored at geocities), and Online Mathematics Textbooks by George Cain who is retired from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Both bring together a wide variety of material from various academics, researchers and enthusiasts.

Some of the textbooks listed are explicitly open, but many are made available for non-commercial purposes or don’t have any licensing information.

Here are a few of the open ones:

• A First Course in Linear Algebra by Rob Beezer (University of Puget Sound). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• A Problem Course in Mathematical Logic by Stefan Bilaniuk (Trent University). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• Measure Theory by D. H. Fremlin (University of Essex). Available under a Design Science License (DSL).
• Introduction to Probability by Charles Grinstead (Swarthmore College) & J. Laurie Snell (Dartmouth College). GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
• Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon (Saint Michaels College, Vermont). Creative Commons – Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA).

Many lecture notes by David Santos are available on Open Math Text under the discontinued Open Publication License which is not fully open as it restricts commercial re-use.

There are also many maths textbooks under Creative Commons Non-Commercial and/or No Derivatives licenses – such as Shlomo Sternberg’s books, Dan Sloughter’s calculus texts or Victor Shoup’s A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra.

This looks to suggest that:

1. It is worth chasing up textbook authors to ask them to clarify whether or not their work is open, and to suggest using an explicitly open license if it is. (See Dead knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters for more on this.)
2. It should be made clear that not all Creative Commons licenses are open. (As was commented on in iCommons 2007: Retrospective Reflections.)

3 Comments June 23, 2007

Site launch

Welcome to Open Text Book – a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition – i.e. free to use, reuse, and redistribute. While in the future we may post text book content, for now the site will be mainly used as a registry.

The recent iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, saw many people express an interest in open text books. Information about the questions and issues raised can be found on the WikiEducator Free Textbooks page. Join the Free Culture freetextbooks mailing list if you want to get involved!

3 Comments June 22, 2007