2) managing assets became unwieldy as size and # of asset types increased
3) editor tools don't support Grammerly or similar
4) every minor cut-and-paste broke links in the build chain
5) difficult to integrate with an LMS (activity completions, etc)
6) could not track student progress or do formative assessment
7) could not add 'learning science' tools (eg: reflection, flashcards)
8) could not add voice reader tools (especially hard for math)
9) painful to track image attributions and associate with image
Without these things, I felt that I was wasting my time. No one reads textbooks anymore, except maybe the night before the final exam.
So building my own 'textbook' engine. Crude example at https://www.communityreading.org/moodle/ (the JSXGraph eample). Better one on the way. Happy to share it.
Thanks for your comment, I understand what you mean. Clearly there are plenty of alternatives to traditional textbooks these days. I've written over 100 posts on Substack and Medium, mainly quite in depths articles. I've also created nearly 60 Youtube videos.
But I am not sure textbooks are completely dead. Articles can only go into so much detail because you can't assume everyone has previously read the other articles that contain the groundwork, so you have to repeat yourself. That limits how much new material you can cover. Animated videos take ages to make, and have a similar problem. A book can go into much more detail.
The book will probably be PDF only. I am wary of going down the route you describe because technologies come and go.
Did you try Lyx?
https://www.lyx.org/Home
I had a simiar itch, tried the same usual suspects.
I intended my textbook to be web-first, not necessarily for print, for a teacher-run course. Ran into several problems, eg::
1) I wanted interactive content (eg: JSXGraph, Monaco editor, Three.JS, etc)
2) managing assets became unwieldy as size and # of asset types increased
3) editor tools don't support Grammerly or similar
4) every minor cut-and-paste broke links in the build chain
5) difficult to integrate with an LMS (activity completions, etc)
6) could not track student progress or do formative assessment
7) could not add 'learning science' tools (eg: reflection, flashcards)
8) could not add voice reader tools (especially hard for math)
9) painful to track image attributions and associate with image
Without these things, I felt that I was wasting my time. No one reads textbooks anymore, except maybe the night before the final exam.
So building my own 'textbook' engine. Crude example at https://www.communityreading.org/moodle/ (the JSXGraph eample). Better one on the way. Happy to share it.
Thanks for your comment, I understand what you mean. Clearly there are plenty of alternatives to traditional textbooks these days. I've written over 100 posts on Substack and Medium, mainly quite in depths articles. I've also created nearly 60 Youtube videos.
But I am not sure textbooks are completely dead. Articles can only go into so much detail because you can't assume everyone has previously read the other articles that contain the groundwork, so you have to repeat yourself. That limits how much new material you can cover. Animated videos take ages to make, and have a similar problem. A book can go into much more detail.
The book will probably be PDF only. I am wary of going down the route you describe because technologies come and go.
It's a risk, but I will see how it goes.
Here's an interesting link: https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
I didn't use his package, not where I was going, but I profited from reading his elegant manual.