New Sage-based textbook

[john_perry_usm]

Dear Sage-edu readers

My institution offers a special course for math and math licensure majors which relies on a computer algebra system. Some years ago, we decided to switch from a proprietary system to Sage, and we haven't regretted it, except for one thing: we couldn't really find a textbook that quite met our curious mix of needs. So, we resolved to write our own, and the selfsame institution supported us with a summer grant.

It took a while, and we attach the result both for your silent entertainment (e.g., "It took them this long to write THIS?!?") and for your constructive input, if you wish. We are interested in any relevant input (not e.g., "It took them this long to write THIS?!?" but, for instance, everything from the title & the license to the very goals, organization, and structure, to say nothing of unjustifiable outright mendacity -- you might have to read a little bit to see what we mean by that).

We will use this in our Spring edition of the course (no humane treatment board approval required, amazingly) but the electronic text will be available at no charge, and with our current publishing arrangement (non-peer-reviewed, on demand publisher) we can submit revisions at any time & know that future printings will incorporate the changes. Eventually we may seek a more traditional publishing arrangement, if only for a formal peer review, but regardless we first would like input on the text itself from smart people who are interested in using Sage for education -- as that, perhaps, is the best sort of peer review we could use.

If nothing else, we hope it conveys our respect for the Sage community.

regards

john perry

[William Stein]

Hi,

I just looked at a bunch of random parts of this and think it's great!
You guys are just being too humble :-).

One request: can you syntax highlight the big blocks of input code? I
might have some helpful tex code for that (using lstlistings) if you
want, which we use for SMC printing of sage worksheets.

Is this book the sort of thing that could legally also get converted
to worksheets and made available inside SMC (or on a static website
with sage cell server)? Rob Beezer just got a grant related to doing
more of that sort of thing. It could also help immensely in expanding
the range of people who can easily use Sage.

Is your main goal with a traditional publisher really **PEER REVIEW**?
Because what happens is they will take 82% of all revenue, then they
will get somebody like me (or someone else likely reading this) to
actually do 100% of the peer review **for free**. It's just like with
journal publication. The only thing the traditional publisher
actually does that has value is marketing (usually not much) and
copyediting -- usually not very well, and even then, you could pay
somebody to do it for not so much. All I'm saying is there might be
a better route to peer review, in which you don't have to give up so
much, and the value is greater. Who knows, your book -- made
**extremely available and accessible ** -- might be just what is
needed for Sage to start growing in usage again (which it hasn't done
for years).

- William

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--
William (http://wstein.org)

[john_perry_usm]

Thank you for the kind words, William. :-)

 

One request: can you syntax highlight the big blocks of input code?

Somehow we didn't think of that. If you have handy, ready-to-plug-in tex code, I could try doing that very soon. Otherwise I'm absolutely swamped this semester, so it ain't gonna happen by hand, or not soon anyway. [Note: sometimes I'll write first-person singular, as I did here, because I'm writing, but essentially I speak for all three authors.]

 

Is this book the sort of thing that could legally also get converted
to worksheets and made available inside SMC (or on a static website
with sage cell server)? Rob Beezer just got a grant related to doing 

more of that sort of thing.  It could also help immensely in expanding
the range of people who can easily use Sage.

I'm going to need help with "legally," but:

(a) The tentative license is CC-BY-NC-SA, unless someone convinces us that's a bad idea.

(b) I really like what I've seen of Rob's work (e.g., on the Judson book). I would be happy for this conversion to be made, and would even do it myself if I had the time & energy, which frankly wouldn't happen before next summer. We used Lyx to type it, so in theory there's even a way to tell Lyx to do this, though it would require the writing of a converter.

(c) As regards my employer's attitude:

(c1) The administration expresses support for, and interest in, open textbooks. They encourage faculty both to use and to produce them.

(c2) I met university counsel, who informed that we were free to proceed as we wish, even charge royalties, notwithstanding the summer stipends we received to write the text. None of this was committed to paper, so I suppose it could change, and we will have a followup meeting. For reasons I won't go into in a public email, I believe that is a permanent position. (I'd be happy to explain in private.)

(d) If you read the preface, then you know what our intent regarding hypothetical proceeds: help math students at our institution, and help the development of Sage. *My* main concern with copyright in this case is that a book whose production was subsidized by a university summer grant, hence ultimately funded by Mississippi's taxpayers, benefit Mississippi's taxpayers rather than someone who at most added a small value to the text.

    (If you didn't read the preface, we address that in the section "Any last words?" By the by, let me know if "The SAGE Foundation" is the best target there.)

 

Is your main goal with a traditional publisher really **PEER REVIEW**?

Yes. That's a long-term consideration, though, so there's plenty of time to suggest a better avenue. Given the open text movement, I would not be surprised if something exists. Additional considerations I had:

• Despite the progress of technology, many students prefer a paper copy of a text, and will print large sections of an electronic text & have it bound. So I'd like that to be available.
• People consider a text more serious if it's from a "respectable" publisher. While my employer currently favors open texts, I can remember a time when they didn't seem to care which journal you published in, as long as it was published. New policies are now in place to prevent the use of vanity journals, and I imagine a similar scenario with open texts in the not-too-distant future.
  
• If there are economies of scale to be had, I suspect a traditional publisher would achieve them much more easily than an on-demand publisher.

This would be our first text, and while I am absolutely ignorant of royalties, aside from the fact that James Stewart built a multimillion dollar house using the proceeds from $150 calculus textbooks (give or take a few tens) and another author has told me he's pretty sure his publisher hid royalties from him, I hope you won't be too offended that I expected the potential audience for this Sage text to approach a somewhat small epsilon multiple of that audience. Feel free to disabuse me of these notions! :-)

 

Because what happens is they will take 82% of all revenue, then they
will get somebody like me (or someone else likely reading this) to
actually do 100% of the peer review **for free**.

Actually, 82% is lower than I expected (I've been told I have a rather dim view of human nature) but what really surprised me is that I was compensated to peer review one chapter from a kth edition of a linear algebra text (positive review), and one new linear algebra text (fairly negative review). The compensation wasn't much, but it was a non-trivial amount to me, and involved an actual, honest-to-goodness paper check for one. (The other was a tidy sum in books.) So I'm genuinely shocked to read your experience.

Under the current arrangement, the cost of a paperback edition is significantly higher than I had hoped, though significantly less than the average non-Springer math textbook. This supposedly includes color output, which we really needed.

 

The only thing the traditional publisher
actually does that has value is marketing (usually not much) and
copyediting  -- usually not very well, and even then, you could pay
somebody to do it for not so much.

This I understood, especially the marketing, but also the negative evaluation of copy editing. Given the nature of our course & thus of our book, I wasn't sure of the potential market.

 

All I'm saying is there might be
a better route to peer review, in which you don't have to give up so
much, and the value is greater.  Who knows, your book -- made
**extremely available and accessible ** -- might be just what is
needed for Sage to start growing in usage again (which it hasn't done
for years).

I am very open to "a better route to peer review," especially if the outcome implies an improved text for our students. I am also happy to help Sage grow if I can. So I am quite open to suggestions. I'll continue to reply here, but perhaps this is better to pursue in private email?

john perry

[Harald Schilly]

On Sunday, October 9, 2016 at 9:30:44 AM UTC+2, john_perry_usm wrote: 

(a) The tentative license is CC-BY-NC-SA, unless someone convinces us that's a bad idea.

 This is indeed a very bad idea, and even not really recommended by creative commons related people. The point is that it violates those basic rules for "free/open content", and hence it would be impossible to use this book in settings like wikipedia or teaching.

wiki https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial

$6.1 of http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/download/jb2006/chapter_06/osjb2006-06-02-en-moeller.pdf

The use of an -NC license is very rarely justi able on economic or ideological grounds. It excludes many people, from free content communities to small scale commercial users, while the decision to give away your work for free already eliminates most large scale commercial uses. If you want to obtain additional protection against large scale exploitation, use a Share-Alike license. This applies doubly to governments and educational or scienti c institutions: content which is of high cultural or educational value should be made available under conditions which will ensure its widespread use. Unfortunately, these institutions are often the most likely to choose -NC licenses.

 Call for getting rid of NC and ND licensing of CC by the free culture foundation

http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/

The NC clause is vague and survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders’ fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use? Where is the line drawn between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn’t.

 Also a blogpost by  Kathi Fletcher

http://kefletcher.blogspot.co.at/2011/10/why-not-nc-non-commercial.html

-- h

[Harald Schilly]

Now I also started to look at the content, first off

On Sunday, October 9, 2016 at 9:30:44 AM UTC+2, john_perry_usm wrote: 

(c1) The administration expresses support for, and interest in, open textbooks.

 well, as mentioned above, open textbooks definitions usually imply that they can be used freely, like software licensed under the GPL (Sage is GPL licensed) etc. With the NC part, this then isn't an open textbook any more -- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NonFreeDocumentationLicenses

> even charge royalties

The bunny picture on page 195 is NC licensed. What is the agreement between the copyright holder of that image and your plan regarding charging royalties and splitting them? That detail alone would make this book very proprietary, since you're now the only one with that licensing agreement between the copyright holder of that picture and nobody else has a real chance to use this book in a context like teaching (simply because it is hard to track down the person, etc.). I'm not sure if this is the intention, but I'm just mentioning this. I would like to see this book getting used somewhere else …

In "Any last words" on page 10 the license is referred to as

> CC-BY-SA

which is what I'm arguing for. Problem is, it is incompatible with the NC of the bunny picture:

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Wiki/cc_license_compatibility

-- h

[john_perry_usm]

Harald

If I understand correctly, the mistake I made was confusing "noncommercial" with "not-for-profit." Thank you for pointing out that very dumb mistake. I have to emphasize this mistake really is on me; I added NC right before uploading it, without thinking too much about it. That explains why you saw CC-BY-SA somewhere else: that was the original plan. I will change that back.

Thank you very much also for noticing the issue with the bunny picture. My confusion on "noncommercial" v. "not-for-profit" is the main reason for that. One of the links you provided suggests that I was on pretty good grounds with that, but now that you point it out I can see that this could be an issue. I have contacted the author via flickr mail to see if he's willing to license it to us under CC-BY-SA, but he hasn't uploaded a photo for more than 2 years, so there may be no reply. I image I'll have to change the picture (we can generate something similar ourselves, and one co-author may well be happy to immortalize his bunny.

john perry

[Rob Beezer]

On 10/08/2016 09:43 PM, William Stein wrote:
> I just looked at a bunch of random parts of this and think it's great!
> You guys are just being too humble :-).

Yes! Looking good. Thanks for making this available.

> Is this book the sort of thing that could legally also get converted
> to worksheets and made available inside SMC (or on a static website
> with sage cell server)? Rob Beezer just got a grant related to doing
> more of that sort of thing. It could also help immensely in expanding
> the range of people who can easily use Sage.

Take a look at

http://abstract.pugetsound.edu/aata/cosets-sage.html

http://abstract.pugetsound.edu/aata/cosets-sage-exercises.html

which are very similar in spirit to what you are doing. I am very close to
having the basic ability to produce this content as SMC worksheets, and *will*
finish that project as part of the grant William mentioned. If you were to
markup your content in MathBook XML you too could have print, PDF, HTML and SMC
versions.

http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/

Rob

[Rob Beezer]

Dear John,

Harald has sent you some great info and advice on licenses. Its a complicated
topic.

I personally like CC BY-SA, and I also frequently use the GFDL (GNU Free
Documentation License) for longer works, even though it can complicate license
compatibility. Here is an incomplete set of posts where I say more:

http://www.beezers.org/blog/bb/category/licenses/

My advice would be to use Amazon's CreateSpace (easy) or Ingram's Lightning
Source (professional) for print-on-demand copies. Add a $5 or $10 "royalty" for
distribution as you suggest (scholarship, Sage) and be totally up-front on the
amount and destination. I'd be surprised if anybody tried to under-cut you, or
if they would be very successful.

For peer-review, the Open Textbook Inititaive at the American Institute of
Mathematics does exactly that. They include Grg Bard's new "Sage for
Undergraduates" book, so there is at least one appropriate category for your
text. They also have a ton of good advice for authors.

http://aimath.org/textbooks/

Rob

On 10/09/2016 07:48 AM, john_perry_usm wrote:
> Harald
>
> If I understand correctly, the mistake I made was confusing "noncommercial" with
> "not-for-profit." Thank you for pointing out that very dumb mistake. I have to
> emphasize this mistake really is on me; I added NC right before uploading it,
> without thinking too much about it. That explains why you saw CC-BY-SA somewhere
> else: that was the original plan. I will change that back.
>

> *Thank you very much* also for noticing the issue with the bunny picture. My

> <https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Wiki/cc_license_compatibility>
>
> -- h

>
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[john_perry_usm]

The bunny picture on page 195 is NC licensed. What is the agreement between the copyright holder of that image and your plan regarding charging royalties and splitting them?

As I wrote earlier, I had asked Kim Bui to grant us explicit permission to use the photo under a CC-BY-SA license. He has agreed. Do you think that is fine? The context included Sage's use of the book.

[john_perry_usm]

Rob

Harald has sent you some great info and advice on licenses.  Its a complicated
topic.

Indeed; I had no idea.

 

My advice would be to use Amazon's CreateSpace (easy) or Ingram's Lightning
Source (professional) for print-on-demand copies.

Right now we're using Lulu, which is similar, I think. Our bookstore manager did know Lulu. I know someone else who has used CreateSpace and recommends it, but I have an aversion to helping Amazon get any richer. :-)

 

Add a $5 or $10 "royalty" for
distribution as you suggest (scholarship, Sage) and be totally up-front on the
amount and destination.  I'd be surprised if anybody tried to under-cut you, or
if they would be very successful.

That's a good point.

 

For peer-review, the Open Textbook Inititaive at the American Institute of
Mathematics does exactly that.

I will keep that in mind; thank you. My institution probably has some information on that; we haven't gotten much past actually finishing the text right now.

I remember looking at MathBook XML and deciding for some reason not to pursue it at the time, but I don't remember why & in any case I think it was a temporary thing. It's not something I can feasibly do right now anyway, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.

john perry

[john_perry_usm]

Rob

Having looked at your weblog, I'd be keen to see further information why you opt for GFDL over CC-BY-SA. Your weblog promises info on that, but I didn't see it in the summary you sent.

john

[kcrisman]

YAY and HOORAY!  Congratulations, I know you guys have been working hard on a lot of good materials at USM.