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About this site

Client

Paul Francis, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department
telephone: (607) 255-9223
email: francis at cs.cornell.edu

Cheaper and Better Textbooks

The aim of this project is to do for the textbook industry what Napster did to the music industry, only legally! What's the problem? You (the student) pay too much for textbooks that are all too often out of date, and half of which you don't even need to read. If you think the professor
is getting all this money, you are wrong. The author gets 10% to 15% of the cover price.

Our goal is to transform the textbook industry, by moving to a wiki-like system that combines the best features of both wikis and conventional printed textbooks.

The text would be available in two forms: online in a wiki-like format, and as a high-quality pdf that can be printed. The online version would be free to all. Advertising revenue would be generated with the online version. The printed version would have a low price tag: low enough
that most people would just as soon buy it as try to print the online pages. The pdf might be personalized in some way (e.g., a footer that gives the name of the purchaser) to discourage file sharing, but there would be no attempt to prevent file sharing per se.

The system is envisioned to have the following features:

• A mechanism for readers to upload suggested corrections.
• Tools to allow readers (or instructors) to pick and choose among a wide set of individual chapters to custom build a text book.
• Ability to allow each author to write one version of the text, but can be rendered by the system as either a wiki or a pdf, and looks great both ways.
• A social element for instructors, allowing them to exchange exam questions, homework questions, and presentation materials. This has to be secure. It might even be tied to CMS.
• A social element for students, ideally as an application on Facebook, that allows students to find each other and share, well, whatever it is that students share.
• A monitoring system that records how pages are watched or printed, and that feeds this into a system that determines how authors, editors, and system owners should be reimbursed.
• A billing back end for purchases of the pdf.
  

How much of this can be done depends on the number of students who sign up, and their skill level. The initial task will be to scope out the project. If it cannot all be done, then enough should be done to provide the basic functionality. The project will be something of a
"systems mashup", where you evaluate many existing software components, and decide the best way to integrate them.

To put this system into production, there is every opportunity to work on it after CS501, either as additional student projects, or as part of a startup company, should we wish to go that route.