Why I killed the Qiskit Textbook
If you’re not familiar with the Qiskit Textbook, this article may not be of interest to you. The Qiskit Textbook was an open-source online educational resource on quantum computing, to which many people (including many IBMers) contributed tutorials and chapters. It has since been sunset and is no longer available as a web page.
I joined IBM in 2022, as Technical Director for Quantum Education, with the aim of advancing digital education on quantum computing. After over 20 years as a professor, I’d grown frustrated with academia and wanted to focus on creating educational resources with lasting value, rather than walking into the same old classrooms and repeating myself over and over, lecture after lecture, year after year, with only memories to show for it. I wanted the resources I created to be available to anyone that wished to learn from them — so I made it clear that I wanted everything I created to be open, not behind a paywall. IBM was actually willing to hire me to do this and to support my efforts, for which I am grateful. Initially, the written content I developed, to go along with a series of videos for the Qiskit YouTube channel, was included in the Qiskit Textbook.
The textbook was incredibly painful to use. It worked by converting Jupyter notebooks into web pages, but there was essentially no documentation, so you never knew exactly what you would get until you tried it. That meant a lot of trial and error to get things to render correctly — but it took 5 minutes to build each time, even for the tiniest change. To get the spacing right in a complicated equation, for instance, could take 30 minutes.
