The internet changed drastically the process of writing books. I saw people making profit from books available online for free. I saw books written chapter by chapter with errors found quickly by first readers. I saw systems that allow commenting parts that are not clear enough with comments how to clarify them.
If you promise to deliver a textbook that teaches skills relevant to engineers, they will fund the time it takes to write the book. I would spare couple of dollars even if you said that it will take 5 years. I believe, there will be even companies that will give you funds upfront. If you reach out for help there will be people who will help you collect example problems from different fields to replace couple of "salt tank problems".
I am not a mathematician, so I don't know how mathematics textbooks are written and how much effort goes into them, so feel free to point out that this idea is stupid.
> I don't know how mathematics textbooks are written and how much effort goes into them
They are written in many ways by many different people.
But some of us have started to write books that are Free, in the sense that software is Free. I have a couple and in addition to making the text and the source available I also sell one of them on Amazon and it does OK (see http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra), because lots of people prefer a paper version when they really get down to studying.
The internet changed drastically the process of writing books. I saw people making profit from books available online for free. I saw books written chapter by chapter with errors found quickly by first readers. I saw systems that allow commenting parts that are not clear enough with comments how to clarify them.
If you promise to deliver a textbook that teaches skills relevant to engineers, they will fund the time it takes to write the book. I would spare couple of dollars even if you said that it will take 5 years. I believe, there will be even companies that will give you funds upfront. If you reach out for help there will be people who will help you collect example problems from different fields to replace couple of "salt tank problems".
I am not a mathematician, so I don't know how mathematics textbooks are written and how much effort goes into them, so feel free to point out that this idea is stupid.