A difficulty with your proposal of textbooks being free and their authors getting paid once by the government is that now someone has to decide which textbook authors get paid. If you pay anyone who writes a textbook you’ll find there are a lot of people writing quite crappy textbooks. Right now there’s some process (probably at the level of teachers?) who decide which textbooks are worth buying and it wouldn’t be easy to have all the teachers to all coordinate on which textbooks should be bought with an unlimited license by the government.
High school textbook are probably a crappy market at present, but it’s still something of pricing mechanism I think you’d need to replicate.
Okay, I see that my idea does depend too much on the situation in my country. (Well, the question was, what crazy ideas are we thinking about. I was thinking about how to improve the situation in my country. But now I see that the solution would not generalize well.)
In Slovakia, the situation is more like “there are no good textbooks” rather than “there are multiple decent textbooks competing on the market”. For example, after computer science was added as a high-school subject, for the few following years there were still no textbooks for the subject; teachers had to improvise. (Which was okay for me, but not for everyone.) For some other subjects, there are textbooks teachers complain about, but it’s all they have.
My guess (I may be completely wrong here) is that writing the entire book is simply too much, even for teachers who are good at what they do. It would take you the entire year, I suppose; and maybe even this would turn out to be a planning fallacy. Maybe it would be better to generate the textbook wiki-style; perhaps start with an inferior product, and keep fixing bugs. In Slovakia, the government dictates which topics need to be taught, in which order. For this project, this could be an advantage: the list of chapters is already given, all you need is write them one by one. Not necessarily each chapter by the same person.
Having multiple versions and choosing from them, that would be a nice problem to have. But even then, I suppose, paying the first author a fixed amount of money in return for giving up copyright would have the advantage that the author no longer can (nor has an incentive to) prevent later improvements by volunteers. I mean, teachers often prepare texts for their classes, and they don’t get paid extra for that; some of them probably wouldn’t mind contributing to the common project.
Definitely a question worth thinking about.
A difficulty with your proposal of textbooks being free and their authors getting paid once by the government is that now someone has to decide which textbook authors get paid. If you pay anyone who writes a textbook you’ll find there are a lot of people writing quite crappy textbooks. Right now there’s some process (probably at the level of teachers?) who decide which textbooks are worth buying and it wouldn’t be easy to have all the teachers to all coordinate on which textbooks should be bought with an unlimited license by the government.
High school textbook are probably a crappy market at present, but it’s still something of pricing mechanism I think you’d need to replicate.
Okay, I see that my idea does depend too much on the situation in my country. (Well, the question was, what crazy ideas are we thinking about. I was thinking about how to improve the situation in my country. But now I see that the solution would not generalize well.)
In Slovakia, the situation is more like “there are no good textbooks” rather than “there are multiple decent textbooks competing on the market”. For example, after computer science was added as a high-school subject, for the few following years there were still no textbooks for the subject; teachers had to improvise. (Which was okay for me, but not for everyone.) For some other subjects, there are textbooks teachers complain about, but it’s all they have.
My guess (I may be completely wrong here) is that writing the entire book is simply too much, even for teachers who are good at what they do. It would take you the entire year, I suppose; and maybe even this would turn out to be a planning fallacy. Maybe it would be better to generate the textbook wiki-style; perhaps start with an inferior product, and keep fixing bugs. In Slovakia, the government dictates which topics need to be taught, in which order. For this project, this could be an advantage: the list of chapters is already given, all you need is write them one by one. Not necessarily each chapter by the same person.
Having multiple versions and choosing from them, that would be a nice problem to have. But even then, I suppose, paying the first author a fixed amount of money in return for giving up copyright would have the advantage that the author no longer can (nor has an incentive to) prevent later improvements by volunteers. I mean, teachers often prepare texts for their classes, and they don’t get paid extra for that; some of them probably wouldn’t mind contributing to the common project.