Advice: have a plan for proofreading and errata. I’ve never had a publisher, and I’m a stickler for writing, so proofreading with a fine tooth comb is something I do anyway. But if it’s not something you do, you won’t have a publisher to help with that.  Dozens of minor errata were reported by readers; we used a Google Form (HTML form backed up by a Google Docs spreadsheet) to collect them.  This has been challenging, because Amazon has their own mechanism that allows readers of Kindle books to report errors.  However, the information reported through that mechanism is relayed sporadically and not sanity-checked; factually incorrect “corrections” from readers are passed straight through, as are complaints from readers who aren’t sophisticated enough to operate their ebook reader devices.  However, those people are Amazon’s customers (and as an author, you are not), so we just have to learn to deal with this.

Advice: set your expectations for “service”. One thing a publisher normally handles is distribution. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing handles that for the Kindle book, but until recently, their service & support for publishers was terrible. (Note that I don’t call it “customer service”. People who buy books are Amazon’s customers. Authors are not.) Recently, though, because of the highly visible success of our MOOC, which uses both the Kindle book and Amazon Web Services infrastructure, Amazon has become much more interested in speaking about strategic things with us, and has given us the level of support usually given to real publishers. We just made our book available on the Nook store and expect to sell it via Google Books starting next month; I’ll report back on whether they are any more responsive to indie authors.

Advice: tell your purchasers to follow you or otherwise let you notify them of updates. A key reason we wanted to do an ebook was the ability to get bug fixes and new content into readers’ hands quickly.  Each release of the book has a version number, starting from 0.8.0 in January 2012 up to 0.8.5 in May 2012.  We applied the errata fixes ourselves, using GitHub to track all book content and tagging the releases as we would with code, and every erratum has a corresponding version number.  Amazon initially told us they’d notify purchasers and allow them to re-download updated versions of the ebook, but they waffled.  (This is now fixed, but only by Amazon’s decision to give us special treatment.)  Without that support, I’m not sure we’d be able to get updates into readers’ hands.  Even so, while readers can now re-download updated versions of our book, it’s up to us (not Amazon) to notify readers when new versions are available.  We can use the MOOC registration email lists to hit many of those people, but others will have to find out for themselves.  We’re now encouraging readers to follow us on Twitter, and we’ll put that text into the next release of the book.

Advice: have a plan for spreading the word via professional forums.  We had already been spreading the word about our course—we had presented posters or talks at CSEET, SIGCSE and ICSE, wrote an op-ed for CACM espousing the teaching of software engineering using SaaS+Agile, and so on.  We’d been collecting names of people who might be interested in trying out our ideas, so naturally we told them about the book too, and offered most of them complimentary copies.  (Unlike with a publisher, the cost of the comp copies comes out of pocket for us, though the print-on-demand house we use, CreateSpace, allows authors to purchase author copies at a price lower than list.)

Advice: be prepared to do your own feet-on-the-ground marketing and publicity.  My marketing experience as a nonprofit theater Board member came in handy.  Following the pattern I’ve used in that world, we designed a postcard and had it printed and direct-mailed by PSPrint to a mailing list we purchased (~600 software engineering professors). The list was ad hoc and included few top-tier departments; in retrospect I’m not sure it was worth the roughly $500 we paid. Successful practice in arts marketing is to follow the postcard with an email reminder a week or two later, but the firm that sold  us the list wouldn’t sell us the corresponding email list, so we paid people to scrape the Web to get them manually (I know, we could’ve Turked it). Then we found out we couldn’t import those addresses into an email list manager such as the excellent MailChimp or ConstantContact, since due to CAN-SPAM laws you may only import email addresses of people who have directly opted in via your own website.  (There’s now an area on our book’s website where you can express interest in the beta program that uses the book.)  So we sent one-on-one emails to just about all those people (600 or so in all).  We also personally reached out to colleagues in top-25 departments with whom we had good personal relationships.  It wasn’t a huge amount of work but it was time not spent on writing.

You can check it out on GitHub as armandofox/latex2ebook

It’s far from complete, has many restrictions on what you can and cannot do, has many quirks arising from both LaTeX weirdnesses and the limitations of current ebook formats, and is scantily documented (I’ll add more docs as time permits).  Still, it should do what it advertises—allow you to create both a printable PDF and a .mobi format (Kindle, Sony and many other readers) ebook from the same set of LaTeX sources, if you follow some careful rules.

Next task is to add support for epub output.  Anyone point me to succinct documentation for the epub format, and/or an open-source tool that takes the various epub assets and wraps them up into the .epub distribution file?

As we promised our alpha-edition buyers, we fixed hundreds of errata and added two new chapters.

(UPDATE: we’ve deleted the spreadsheet rows corresponding to the fixed errata, which numbered over 200.  So if you look at this list now you’ll find only newer errata reported in last couple of weeks.  You can use Google Spreadsheets’ versioning feature to see an older version of the spreadsheet showing all the errata we fixed.)

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) had told us that when we did this, all we had to do was:

(a) email Amazon and have them notify readers of the changes, and that they could receive a free re-download

(b) email our readers (if we knew who they were) and tell them to contact Amazon customer support and request a free re-download

We have done (b), so Amazon can expect to hear from a lot of readers, especially given that I tried to do (a) two days ago and finally got a robot response from KDP saying “Send us a detailed list of your changes. If we agree they’re major, we’ll notify people.  If they cause formatting issues, we’ll pull your ebook” (as they did without telling us in January).

I tried to reply to this email, as instructed, with a description of the changes and a link to the errata page on which the problems were reported.  Indeed, Amazon itself emailed us a number of haphazard complaints about content (some of which were factually wrong or themselves contained speling errerrs) about the ebook during the 3 months since it was first released.

My reply email bounced.

If I was an Amazon customer having this experience trying to buy a book, someone would likely get fired.  Yet the only reason our previous author problems got any attention is because we used out-of-band research relationships to escalate it through an organization that until then had shown not the slightest sign of giving a shit about the concerns of authors.

Perhaps Amazon will become one more faceless channel for companies like BookLocker or Vook, competing against Google Books and iBooks in a race-to-the-bottom business.  Publishers may take 85 cents on the dollar, but at least they don’t respond with robot emails.  Amazon KDP should decide if it wants to positively engage authors, or commoditize them.  It can’t do both.

Look for Engineering Long-Lasting Software on Google Books in the next week or so.

Although at the time of writing we didn’t even know we were going to offer this content in an online course, as it turns out, the same reasons we believe the course worked well at Berkeley also allowed us to offer it as a MOOC.

What are your thoughts?  Are you doing something similar at your institution?  Have suggestions for us?  Leave comments here or on the CACM article!

• CACM article
• Short video expanding on the article and demonstrating autograding tools we used in MOOC
• Our inexpensive textbook (print/ebook) specifically designed to complement this course—we’re looking for interested instructors, especially in North America, who want to try out these ideas in the classroom in Fall 2012

Amazon’s mission is to be the world’s most customer-focused company, or something like that.

Did they even try to test out the Kindle Fire UI on any of their customers before inflicting it on us?

I’m really, really trying to like this device (our lab bought a couple to test out).  I’m a committed ebook fan and Kindle owner: I already own three Kindle hardware devices, not counting the Kindle Reader apps I have on my Macbook Air, iPad, and iPhone.  So I am predisposed to want to like this device.

If I download (buy) a book from the Kindle store, it shows up under Books.  If I sideload or download a PDF book, it shows up under Docs.  If I sideload or download a true ebook (.mobi file) not purchased on Kindle store (e.g., purchased through Pragmatic Programmers, SitePoint, or any other of a number of technical publishers that distribute their ebooks directly off their site), it shows up in Docs.

When I go to Apps, my choices are “device” or “cloud”.  OK, I want to search for a new type of app, so I tap Cloud, and then Search.  No results.  Oh, I see, I have to go to the “store” to search for new apps.  That’s different from “cloud”.  In fact, the Search button seems to do something different and inconsistent in every context in which it’s available.

I have not found a decent free app for Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Reader, or Gmail.  Weird given that Google is the company behind Android, the Fire’s OS.  (I know it’s an “Amazon adaptation” of Android, but it’s almost like they went out of their way to make it even more clunky and unusable on the Fire than on other Android tablets.)  Yes, I can use the Web versions of those apps, but they don’t work particularly well on the Fire’s smaller screen.

The popup keyboard is unusable.  It’s too hard to describe why; try using it and you’ll see.  Auto-correction doesn’t work.  Different softkeys pop up at different times, so the softkey that was a left-parenthesis a second ago is now some random other thing, because you mistyped a word.  The key that means “shift” sometimes turns into the key that means “make the keyboard immediately disappear with no obvious way to bring it back.”  I have an iPhone and use the autocorrect all the time, and it’s graceful enough to give up and not correct your word if you “mistype” it twice in a row.  Fire’s autocorrect will correct your “wrong” word the same way again, and again, and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again,and again, until you just want to punch the device’s GorillaGlass screen.

The reading experience isn’t good.  I talked about this already in an earlier post.

The one and only thing this device has going for it—and the only reason I still try to use it at all: when reading in bed, its backlight means I don’t have to turn on a reading lamp.  This is important for my spouse, who doesn’t read in bed.  If it were up to me, I’d use my black & white Kindle 3G or Kindle DX exclusively.

I never thought I’d say this, but someone has come up with a mobile device experience that is worse than any version of Windows Mobile I’ve used, and I’ve used Windows Mobile since back when they were competing against the original PalmOS.

Apparently the Kindle Fire UI was designed by the same team that designed the unusable “Manage Your Kindle” page on Amazon.  In an era where Google and others have shown how tasteful use of JavaScript can make for a responsive and compelling UI, Amazon has figured out a way to make JavaScript so obtrusive that it makes the UI worse than if only HTML and Web 1.0 technniques were involved.  Don’t take my word for it; try it yourself.  I have about 140 items in my Kindle library, and “managing” them on Amazon’s site is just a joke.  It’s unusable.  There are bugs that cause random popup div’s with raw JSON to appear; the page is slow, and you can’t click on anything until it finishes loading because everything is re-rendering out from under you; no matter how many titles you own, you can never view more than 10 at a time, cannot filter the view, and cannot select multiple titles to perform a batch action (say, batch delete); you cannot manage “collections” and have them sync to your Kindle devices, as you can do with playlists in iTunes; I could go on.  If this UI was a class project at Berkeley it would get a C.

Thank heavens for Calibre.  It’s not perfect, but it’s by far the best overall ebook management app out there now.  And it’s free.  I couldn’t help myself, I sent a few tens of dollars as a donation to the author.  You should too, if only to get him on Amazon’s radar.  Amazon: buy this person, throw away all of your horrendous ebook “management” pages, and replace it with Calibre somehow.  Heck, rebrand and redistribute it and make the author rich.  He deserves it.

I know it’s possible to buy 2 Kindle Fires for the price of one iPad, but it’s also possible to buy two cans of dog food for the price of one sandwich—I’ll still take the sandwich.  Holy crap, does this device suck.  Too bad, because it would be good for customers if the iPad had some serious competition.  This device could have been that, but isn’t.

We were concerned (especially after Homework 2, which we knew was tough) that we were just going to lose everybody.  But no—over 5,000 people are still with us, comparable to Prof. Jennifer Widom’s database course, which I hold as the benchmark.

Dave and I are impressed with the perseverance of the online students, especially given that most have full time jobs.  The next time around we will probably expand the course by a week or two in order to space out the deadlines a bit.  (We just extended most of the homework deadlines by a week for the online course.)  We are also hiring local help (Berkeley students!) to help further debug the homeworks, improve the autograders, create new assignments and quizzes, monitor the forums more regularly, and fix the A/V quality (we know, we know).

We definitely plan to offer this course for free at least a couple of more times over the summer.  Beyond that it’s unclear what will happen–it’s no secret that Coursera is a for-profit company, and we don’t know how long they will make courses available for free.  However, we’re excited enough about this that we will make sure to find some way to keep getting the material out there, and if we can do so for free, we will.  We’ll even get a chance to meet a few of the online students in person—they formed a study group that meets at a Starbucks close to UC Berkeley!

A big thanks to those who had faith in us and have continued to persevere through the course!  And especially those who bought the book—we have 2 new chapters just about ready to go and they’ll be available as a free upgrade around two weeks from now.  As promised, anyone who bought the Kindle edition will continue to get free updates until the book is content-complete.

So…as we get close to the end of the first iteration…

To those who hung on until the end despite the problems: THANK YOU for your patience, for the constructive feedback you provided via the forums, personal emails, comments on these blog posts, and however else you reached out to us.  You’ve made it worthwhile for us by letting us know you were getting something out of the course!

To Instructors: if you’d like to beta test this material in your classrooms, we’ll even offer to run the autograders for you.  See our beta program description if you might be interested.

To Griefers who tried to poison the forum atmosphere early on: see ya, and don’t let the door hit your a** on the way out.  The smart money says that a whole bunch of companies besides Coursera are about to start trying to monetize courses like this (you can read about it in the latest Wired, in the NY Times, and elsewhere), so next time you’ll at least be paying for the right to complain.

And now…Spriiiing Breeeeaaaaak!!!  Wooooo!!! (For the next week I can work from home instead of going to campus.)

P.S.: I had some technical video difficulties with “SaaS TV #2″ (salesforce.com) but it should be posted by tomorrow.  SaaS TV #3 (with GitHub) should be available by April 4.  It’s must-see TV.

UPDATE:  I got an unexpected opportunity to speak with Raffi Krikorian, Director of Engineering at Twitter!  That conversation is the basis of the just-posted SaaS TV #3. Next week we hope to post #4 (with Zach Holman of GitHub) and, hopefully, #5 (Dan Webb of Twitter talking about the present and future of JavaScript)!

One aspect of offering the online course has been to remind me that “On the Internet, nobody can confront you for being an a**hole.”

I just have to copy-and-paste (verbatim) a recent posting from a student [sic] in the online course forums, because paraphrasing just won’t do it justice:

As you don’t take care of us, the students, due the quality of the course I decide to quit this one

If you (the organizers) realize how important is our time and you decide to take this course seriously then perhaps I will return

Do you (the organizers) realize how many courses like this one are there? Do you realize how serious are them (see udacity for example) and how they care about us?

Is this the quality of the whole university? I now understand why stanford or others are more reputated than cal tech: because they take care about what they are doing but not you, you are making a fudge here and I have no time for fudges

…it goes on for awhile like this.  I don’t even know who this person is—he or she posts as “Garito” with no other information.

I’ve dealt with whiny students before, but this level of entitlement is, frankly, stunning.  Besides the fact that “Garito” provides no actual suggestions and confuses UC Berkeley with Cal Tech, what gets me is the downright nasty and ad hominem assertion:  You don’t care about what you’re doing, or about the students.

We’ve already acknowledged a number of technical glitches that have slowed things down and that we’re working to fix, but “Garito’s” statement is just injurious and insulting.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.  I volunteer at a nonprofit community theater, and for years it’s been our consistent experience that the worst customers are the ones who got free tickets.  As a group, they complain more, are more likely to cancel at the last minute or walk out of the performance, write the nastiest reviews, and rarely turn into repeat customers even when they said they loved the show.  That is, they’re more motivated by getting a ticket for free than by the product offered.  (That’s also why our theater doesn’t do deals with GroupOn and similar outfits.)

I strongly suspect that online education purveyors will reach a similar conclusion, and hopefully that’ll happen before instructors get sufficiently turned off by attitudes like these that they decide to stop donating hundreds of uncompensated extra work hours for the “Garitos” of the world.

I know it’s human nature, when you’re trying to do a good job at something, to focus disproportionately on negative feedback; very few students, even those with legitimate grievances, have been anything like “Garito” and many more have been very positive in their comments. So in this case, sorry, “Garito”, but all I can really say, to use your own terminology, is “fudge you.”

Not having done this before, of course I’m apprehensive.  Will people “get” the material the way we explain it?  Will the book be useful (to those who are buying it)?  Will our autograders (which go far beyond the multiple-choice autograders used in previous courses on Coursera) scale?  Will the material appeal to most of the people taking the course, whose educational profile is pretty different from that of the Berkeley undergraduates for whom the course was originally designed?

The good news is that the course at Berkeley is going quite well, even with lots of new material since any previous offering and even dry-running some of the technologies that will be used for the online version.

And I’m also inspired by Prof. Jennifer Widom’s blog post “from 100 students to 100,000” about her recent experience teaching her Intro to Databases course at this scale.  I found myself mentally saying “+1″ to a lot of her statements, such as “Creating these [multiple-choice but nontrivial] exams, at just the right level, turned out to be one of the most challenging tasks of the entire endeavor”; “having 60,000 students is the need for absolute perfection: not one tiny flaw or ambiguity goes unnoticed”; and the emails from students who were “unabashedly, genuinely, deeply appreciative” (her emphasis).

We’ve received a few nice emails like that too, although like Prof. Widom, we’ve also (already!) got a handful of complainers.  So far, because there isn’t much actual content to complain about yet (the course just launched yesterday), most of those have been either about the fact that the book is not readily available in their country (to which I’m sympathetic) or the fact that it isn’t free (to which I’m not).  One person was wondering why we aren’t paying them to give us feedback on this early version.  (I guess this person doesn’t post reviews on Amazon or Yelp either, unless those companies have a payola system I don’t know about.)

The problem of the book not being available in some places is vexing.  Most of these complaints have come from students in the Middle East.  I hope they realize that we don’t control where Amazon does business and that we are actively looking at options for wider distribution, though I don’t know that we will solve this problem in time for the current offering of the class.  But we really do want to make the book available to as many people as possible.

That said, some people are apparently multiplying 60,000 by $10 (the price of the ebook) and assuming we (the authors) are cackling to ourselves while sleeping on a big pile of money, or expressing some level of indignation that we’re not giving the book away.  The facts are more modest—fewer than 5% of enrolled students have bought the book, we don’t receive anywhere near 100% of the price of each copy sold, we haven’t seen a penny of revenue yet (it takes over 60 days to actually get paid, and the book wasn’t available til mid-January), and it’s cost roughly $20,000 of our own money so far (not Berkeley’s money) and thousands of additional hours of our own time (in addition to our regular duties at Berkeley, so it comes out of our weekends and vacations) to create.  That’s not counting the extra time (also our own) to adapt the course materials, develop autograders that (we hope) will provide meaningful feedback on programming assignments, and so on—work that we wouldn’t have done for the on-campus version and was undertaken specifically to do the best job we could with the online version.  It’s great that ebooks make the cost of distribution  nearly zero, but that doesn’t mean the cost of designing and creating the content is also zero. (Just ask my spouse if you don’t believe me!)

So that’s why the book isn’t free, and relax, we are not doing this in order to quit our day jobs.  Indeed, one might conclude that we actually like our day jobs quite a bit if we are willing to do all the extra work (for no extra compensation) of repurposing the course to reach 60,000 students within the constraints of Coursera’s infrastructure, despite the fact there is an active thread on the course forums about “how can I get a copy for free.”

So, to those of you who’ve expressed gratitude and well-wishes, we thank you deeply, and remind you that attitudes like yours are one of the reasons we LIKE teaching and were foolhardy enough to try this project.  We really and truly hope you will get something positive out of the course and that you’ll be motivated to give us constructive criticism on how to improve it, and when the inevitable infrastructure issues do occur, we hope you will be patient as we try to work them out.  We’re trying all kinds of stuff that even other courses on Coursera haven’t tried yet, especially where autograding is concerned.

And to those of you who believe we are doing this as a secret plot to cash out early, or who believe it is your right to get the book for free for whatever reason, sorry to disappoint you but I’m afraid we are just not as cynical as you.  We hope you get something out of the course anyway, and respectfully ask that you respect our work and our effort.

(Personally, like most people I believe that eventually these courses will have to charge some kind of tuition or find an underwriting model, since the expenses are nontrivial: we’ve used our connections with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and GitHub, among others, to secure donations of free products and services to support the class, but probably not everyone can do that.  My hunch is that if direct tuition were involved, even if it was only $10, a lot of these complaints would go away.  I spend a lot of volunteer time helping to run a small theater, and one thing we’ve learned is that if you give product away, some people conclude that it has no value, and they are the ones who tend to complain the most loudly.  The ones who pay usually say “I can’t believe you don’t charge more.”  It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for online courses.)