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He writes some easy to read, get to the basics books on physics and they're available to buy via lulu or free for download here.

Exclusive publishing rights. Just like B&N, they want their program to be something more than simple wrappers around public domain content.
That's their choice. He has other alternatives for distribution, and has decided to GIVE it away.

This particular case has a lot of features that will make people sympathize more with Amazon and less with the author. But there are many other cases where the facts are different. As an example, I'm the author of some math and physics books that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, free in LaTeX, PDF, and HTML formats, and also available in print. I'm essentially the sole author, although I do have material in the books such as photos from wikimedia commons. I basically operate on a nonprofit basis, but I do have significant webhosting expenses. (The PDF files are a lot of megabytes, and a lot of people download them, so I can't use el cheapo webhosts.) I don't mind making a few bucks here and there to offset those expenses. I looked into selling my books on amazon for, say, $0.99, in kindle format. Well, one thing I immediately learned is that ebook formats and readers don't have good enough support for math to do a good job on books with a lot of math in them. But anyway, there were also two showstoppers: (1) amazon requires exclusivity, and (2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option. OK, you don't have to cue the world's smallest violin. It's not a huge tragedy for me that I can't sell on amazon. But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.

Yes, it's also true that in a free-enterprise system, we don't expect to be able to tell a company that they have any moral or legal duty to sell a product that they don't want to sell. However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.

If he wants the literal comic book version, I'd start here: http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+manga+guide+to&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=5776752567&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13913853472143733238&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&ref=pd_sl_59fmehhy56_e

There are also plenty of good free/open source text books out there. For example, this guy's stuff is pretty good, and quite readable: http://lightandmatter.com/

You've made an admirable attempt to define your question clearly, but you didn't quite succeed. General relativity can be understood at a variety of mathematical levels, so saying you want to understand "the mathematics of general relativity" doesn't really pin it down.

The other issue is that you haven't defined your physics background. If you really want to understand GR, you need to be fairly sophisticated in physics.

The first thing I'd suggest is that you build a solid foundation of understanding in special relativity. The best intro to SR is Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics, and you already have the math background to understand that.

Physically, GR is a field theory. The first field theory was electromagnetism. E&M is a lot easier to understand than GR, because it takes place on a fixed background of flat spacetime, and it also connects directly to everyday experience. The more intuition and technical skill you can build up in the context of E&M, the better prepared you'll be for GR. For someone ambitious about going far in physics, the best intro to E&M is Purcell, Electricity and Magnetism. Purcell uses vector calculus, and he tries to teach you all the vector calc you need as he goes along. However, you will want some of the preparation provided by a second-semester calc course, and you will probably also have an easier time if you can also study from a separate book on vector calculus. Here is a free online calc book that I like, and here is a free vector calc book you could use. When you're learning second-semester calc, I'd suggest you skip the integration tricks that form the bulk of such a course; they're largely irrelevant to your goal, and nowadays you can use Maxima or integrals.com for that kind of thing.

With that background, you're more than prepared to start studying GR at the level of Exploring Black Holes, by Taylor and Wheeler.

If you want to go on after that and understand GR at a higher mathematical level, you could try an upper-division undergrad book such as Hartle or my own free book, and then maybe move on to a graduate-level texts. The mathematics used in graduate-level texts is typically introduced explicitly in the text itself; basically tensors and calculus on a manifold. You don't need any more math prerequisites than vector calculus before diving in. The classic graduate text is Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. I would still recommend it wholeheartedly, except that it's now decades out of date. A more modern alternative is Carroll; there is a free online version, plus a more complete and up to date print version. Other GR books worth owning are General Relativity by Wald and The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time by Hawking and Ellis.

I'm a physicist.

Some physicist is very welcome to fill in here, but I'm not sure it's correct to say that the universe "expands faster" than the speed of light. Locally, the expansion is slow[...], and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.

The speed of expansion of point A relative to point B depends on how far apart A and B are. If you take A and B to be sufficiently far apart, the speed is greater than c. If you take A and B close rnough together, the speed can be as small as you like.

and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.

Either explanation is OK. General relativity doesn't say that one is right and one is wrong.

As a side note: One theory of the ultimate fate of the universe is that the expansion rate will increase past the point where the observable universe becomes smaller than atoms and other particles (a higher expansion rate means objects must be closer to each other for light travelling between them to overcome the expansion of the distance between them), essentially ripping all matter apart.

This is incorrect. Strongly bound systems like a hydrogen atom, a solar system, or a galaxy are almost completely unaffected by cosmological expansion. More info here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/html_books/genrel/ch08/ch08.html#Section8.2

Open textbooks for freshmen level classes should be possible

There are free/open textbooks in mathematics, at least at the fresher level. Here are a few:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/calc/calc.pdf some physics books are at the same site
ftp://joshua.smcvt.edu/pub/hefferon/book/book.pdf
http://www.math.uiowa.edu/~stroyan/InfsmlCalculus/FoundInfsmlCalc.pdf
http://www.mecmath.net/calc3book.pdf
http://www.opensourcemath.org/books/mauch-applied_math/applied_math.pdf
LaTeX source is available for some of them. These books mostly bridge from high school calculus to first year college vector calculus (the last one goes a bit further), but may not be aligned with a particular professor's path through the topics. There are various others at high school level, and quite a few in specialized/advanced areas, but not so many at the undergrad level. It's worth browsing through the categories at http://planetmath.org/?op=mscbrowse&from=books for slightly more advanced topics.

Some of Benjamin Crowell's work, of which I am a fan.

from Benjamin Crowell. I liked it so much I payed for a printed copy from lulu. It seems to me that these are the textbooks of the future, not created by school boards, but chosen by individual teachers from a wealth of free or low-cost online material. If you don't like textbooks, write one, publish it online and at lulu and give teachers the right to choose their own materials for teaching.

My wife's free French textbook: http://www.lightandmatter.com/french/

General relativity has been verified countless times, from the existence of black holes, to gravitational lensing, to even time dilation. General relativity effects are even needed to be compensated for in GPS clock calculations. Are there aspects of general relativity left to be tested?

Sure. Of course you have to distinguish between falsifying Newtonian mechanics and verifying general relativity. It only takes one observation to disprove a theory, but proving a theory correct is a whole different matter.

A good (but somewhat out of date) popular-level description of this kind of thing is "Was Einstein Right?" by Clifford Will.

Some examples of things that are still left to test about GR:

1. Nobody has been able to directly verify Einstein's century-old prediction that low-amplitude disturbances in the gravitational field propagate at c. A claim was made that it had been done in 2003, but it was wrong: [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302294 [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0304006 [3] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0301145
2. Nobody knows whether gravitational torsion exists. Einstein and Cartan played around with it as a way of making a GUT. String theory requires it to exist. The experimental evidence so far has put an upper limit on it.
3. There are various theories of gravity that are consistent with GR in a certain limit, but differ from it in ways that should be empirically detectable. Two examples are the Brans-Dicke theory and Oestvang's quasi-metric relativity. The selling points of the Brans-Dicke theory are that it's supposedly more "Machian" than GR, and at one time it was thought to reproduce certain solar-system measurements that GR couldn't reproduce, although that turned out to be wrong. Oestvang claims that he can reproduce the Pioneer anomaly. Even if they turn out to be wrong, it's important to have them as "test theories." If you don't have any alternative theoretical framework, then it's impossible to decide what experiments to do to test GR, and it's impossible to interpret results of experiments unambiguously. This is basically the reason that it's been impossible to test propagation of gravitational effects at c; we don't have a viable test theory that predicts that they don't propagate at c, so there's no way to interpret the results of experiments.
4. There are various open theoretical problems in classical GR (cosmic censorship, chronology protection conjecture), which may have some bearing on whether the theory is even self-consistent as a classical theory of gravity. There's a strong argument that if cosmic censorship fails, GR fails as a classical theory.
5. There are significant questions, which could be resolved by observation, about the extent to which quantum effects alter the classical picture of the formation and structure of black holes. See, e.g.: http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0346

Are you using Debian? If so, can you try my latest package for it, before it's sent to SID and report if it's running well or not? :)

Hi -- I'd be glad to take a look. First could you drop me an email using the address given at http://www.lightandmatter.com/area4author.html ? I want to make sure we have two-way communication before I put any effort in.

I'm also a college professor, and I've done the same thing you're doing. I originally used GFDL, because CC didn't exist yet. Later I switched to a dual-licensing scheme with both GFDL and CC-BY-SA, because I wanted to be able to share with other people using CC-BY-SA. Eventually Wikipedia switched all of its licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, so I've dropped the GFDL licensing. So rather than the two options you mentioned, let me discuss three:

1. CC-BY-SA - You can use other people's materials that are CC-BY-SA licensed. This includes Wikipedia, for photos. The Share-Alike (SA) part means that other people can only use your work if the thing they're using it in is under the same license; this eliminates the feeling that someone will cynically exploit your work for their own commercial gain, in a project that they themselves will not make freely available.
2. GFDL - You can use other people's materials that are GFDL licensed, but this isn't such a big benefit, since there isn't that much GFDL content out there anymore. (WP used to be GFDL, but essentially everything on there is now relicensed under CC-BY-SA.) You get the same Share-Alike thing as with CC-BY-SA.
3. CC-BY - This is a very liberal license. It says anyone can use your work, even in a commercial product that is not free.

My recommendation would be CC-BY-SA. Another possibility would be dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but that's probably not worth the extra work unless you've identified materials you want to use that are under GFDL. Only do CC-BY if you simply want to make a gift to the world, and you don't care if your work is repackaged into something non-free by other people.

For instance, I wrote a physics textbook, which is open-source

No you didn't. I didn't compose an open source song, and that guy over there didn't make open source blueberry jam.

I don't understand your point. It is open source. The source code is in latex format. Latex is a Turing-complete programming language, which people use as a format for writing documents. You can download the source code of my book here (scroll down to the bottom of the page). The source code is under a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). So I would say that that makes the book an open-source book by any reasonable definition of open source.

Well, your professor didn't think about it much then, or didn't bother to do any research on the subject. This guy seems to have figured it out just fine, with free downloads and print-on-demand from Lulu. I've had many other professors who offered just PDFs.

+10 Insightful. I'm planning something like this myself, using open source textbooks, problem sets, and lectures freely available on Youtube. Or perhaps someone can suggest a better video website for long (~50 minute) lectures with high resolution for the equations recorded from an overhead projector- my tool of choice in the classroom. Any other suggestions for a free online physics course? (I can be contacted using the email address on the "about" page accessible from my homepage.)

Lots of incorrect statements here.

If you want to manage an open source textbook project be warned that if you want a professor to use it you're going to have to assume the role of editor and put up your reputation to vouch for whatever goes into it.

Open-source is not the same thing as multi-author. My own physics textbooks are open-source, but I'm the only author. Open-source, in the context of a textbook, simply means it's under an appropriate copyleft license (e.g., CC-BY-SA), and it's in an open, editable format (e.g., latex). It does not mean that anyone who wants to can alter the contents of my books.

If you want to start a wiki textbook project, there's no shortage of wiki sites, but nobody is going to use it in an official capacity. Just like Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia, wiki texts don't either.

Totally wrong. This is exactly what ck12 and curriki are doing. Yes, their books have been adopted by schools. You seem to be imagining that all wikis are publicly editable. Just because something is a wiki, that doesn't mean that it's editable by anyone. For instance, the books on ck12 can't be edited unless you ask for an account and convince them you know enough to make a positive contribution. Also, "Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia" is a correct statement if you're talking about citing references. An equally true statement is "textbooks don't fly in academia" -- that is, nobody cites a textbook as a reference.

I hope that at least for a college-level physics textbook that you have at least considered http://lightandmatter.com/ ?

This text is already the primary introductory physics text that includes chapter problems and has been vetted over the course of several years of experience in actual classroom usage at several colleges. Besides, I happen to like the principle author of the book as well, who has considerable experience in open source textbook publishing.

They don't have to be full of mistakes, and the problem is that most of the content you are referring to is usually the equivalent of a very early preliminary draft that hasn't had the polish that a good editor can provide. Getting the synergy together for putting this level of polish on open source texts is a hard thing to do, as that implies you have a whole community of folks with similar interests that want to see that the content gets the polish that it deserves. This is something that has happened with open source software projects, but seems to be lacking for textbook collaboration.

One additional problem I've seen with the on-line textbook collaborators is that egos get in the way of getting the kind of cooperation that is commonly found with software collaboration. Those with the experience and knowledge that could put the kind of professional spit and polish on open source textbooks usually try to go off on their own and set up a competing website or small group that often isn't a large enough group to get anything of substance accomplished. In the case of Ben Crowell (from Light and Matter), he stayed focused on one topic and aimed to maintain the quality on that topic. Such an effort takes years, and perhaps even decades to accomplish, and certainly writing a book is a much more complex task than trying to write a simple article like something found on Wikipedia.

For a catalog of free and/or open-source books, see my sig. I've written some free physics textbooks, and have been fairly successful getting them adopted at colleges and high schools (scroll down on that page for a list of adoptions).

In my experience, college profs and high school teachers tend to be pretty open-minded about adopting free books. I haven't seen much evidence of any stigma associated with the fact that they're not published by a big publishing house. High school teachers at public high schools generally don't get the freedom to choose a book that hasn't been approved by the state bureaucracy, but teachers at Catholic schools and charter schools do. Most of my high school adoptions have been from private religious schools.

Promoting a self-published book is always difficult. For me it's been mostly word of mouth, but I've also paid for ads in The Physics Teacher now and then.

I started out by doing the order fulfillment myself. That was nuts. After doing that for years, I was extremely happy to have it done by lulu -- no fuss, no muss. Pros and cons of lulu:

• They do the order fulfillment. That means I don't need a business license or a merchant credit card account anymore. I don't need to do sales tax returns anymore. I don't have to extend credit to customers, or nag the flaky ones to pay their bills. I don't have to worry about going on vacation in the summer when orders are going to come in. I don't have to lay out capital to print hundreds of books at a time, or fill up all the closets in my house with them.
• Lulu, unlike almost all vanity presses, offers an option where you don't pay them any money initially. That option is good. Use it. People who pay a vanity press to publish their book are mostly fooling themselves. Money is supposed to flow to the author; if it flows the other way it's generally a scam. With lulu's free option you don't get an ISBN. Don't worry about it. I've never had a college bookstore or high school get upset because there was no ISBN for the book. They handle instructors' course packs, etc., that don't have ISBNs, and they're used to it.
• Support is more or less nonexistent. They have forums, and the other users on those forums are often very nice, but the chances of getting a helpful response from lulu staff are pretty low in my experience.
• Don't use their USPS Media Mail shipping options, and make sure to warn your customers not to use it. The books will arrive six weeks late and damaged.
• I have had lots of hassles with PDFs. Often a PDF will print fine for a year, but then one day someone will place an order, the particular subcontractor that's supposed to print the books for that region will get an error, and then I have a problem. The customer gets an email saying the order couldn't be fulfilled. I get an email saying there was an error, but not what the error was. This always seems to happen when the order is some gigantic order from a big university, and I'm out of town. Not fun. To maximize your chances that the pdf will work, and work reliably, make sure that no fonts are subsetted, and that 100% of fonts are embedded. If you're generating them with ghostcript (or one of the many other pieces of software that use gs under the hood), make sure it's a recent version of gs.

It sounds like you're planning on selling to colleges. Don't underestimate the insane cheapness of impoverished college students. If your book costs significantly more in print than it would cost them to download it and print it out at Kinko's, they'll download it and print it. No, it's not logical to save thirty-seven cents by printing the book out instead of buying a nice, bound copy. Yes, they'll do it anyway. For this reason, do not expect to make any money on this project. Do it if it makes you happy. Do it if it scratches your itch. The good thing about lulu is that if you use their free option, you're guaranteed not to *lose* any money.

Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.

Your statement is literally true, but very misleading. The state didn't ask anyone to submit ancillary materials, so even if the ancillary materials exist, you're not going to see them listed on the clrn.org site. As a specific example, I submitted my physics textbook, and my ancillary materials are available here. They include a test bank, solutions to homework problems, and an instructor's manual.

This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.

My book includes a web site, assessment software, lots of homework problems and solutions, and automatic grading software.

But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort.

In my own field, physics, your description is completely inaccurate in critical ways. Big commercial books like Halliday and Resnick come out in new editions every few years. The new editions typically have zero changes to the presentation of the material, and very few new homework problems. What they actually tend to do is renumber the homework problems so that it becomes a huge hassle to use the old edition side by side with the new one. This is simply to kill off the market for used books.

I'd also be interested in seeing your evidence for your statement that 'open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue.' Open textbooks are actually easier to change, because they're typically not produced and distributed via conventional printing. They're either distributed purely via the web or, in some cases, via print on demand services like lulu. In fact, one of the governor's big talking points in favor of free and open-source textbooks has been that they can be updated more rapidly, unlike antiquated paper books from traditional publishers. In fact, one of the issues discussed extensively at the symposium this week was the fear that open-source textbooks would change too quickly. The K-12 bureacracy is heavily oriented toward top-down control over textbook selection, and they actually want to impose a two-year freeze on digital texts once they're approved, so that the books won't change after having been blessed as conforming to state standards.

And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks.

Huh? This "can't" be delivered by open textbooks? This is particularly off base. In fact, automatic electronic grading was pioneered by open-source folks at universities. One of the first systems used for math and physics was LON-CAPA, which is open-source software that was first developed about 20 years ago at MSU, and is still being actively developed and supported. Here is a list of some open-source software for this type of thing. What's changed within the last few years is that the publishers have started offering these things as services that students have to pay for, and promoting them heavily in publications like The Physics Teacher. So if all you've been exposed to is sales reps' pitches, I can see how you'd be under the impression that it only exists in proprietary form, but that's completely inaccurate.

Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.

Your statement is literally true, but very misleading. The state didn't ask anyone to submit ancillary materials, so even if the ancillary materials exist, you're not going to see them listed on the clrn.org site. As a specific example, I submitted my physics textbook, and my ancillary materials are available here. They include a test bank, solutions to homework problems, and an instructor's manual.

This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.

My book includes a web site, assessment software, lots of homework problems and solutions, and automatic grading software.

But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort.

In my own field, physics, your description is completely inaccurate in critical ways. Big commercial books like Halliday and Resnick come out in new editions every few years. The new editions typically have zero changes to the presentation of the material, and very few new homework problems. What they actually tend to do is renumber the homework problems so that it becomes a huge hassle to use the old edition side by side with the new one. This is simply to kill off the market for used books.

I'd also be interested in seeing your evidence for your statement that 'open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue.' Open textbooks are actually easier to change, because they're typically not produced and distributed via conventional printing. They're either distributed purely via the web or, in some cases, via print on demand services like lulu. In fact, one of the governor's big talking points in favor of free and open-source textbooks has been that they can be updated more rapidly, unlike antiquated paper books from traditional publishers. In fact, one of the issues discussed extensively at the symposium this week was the fear that open-source textbooks would change too quickly. The K-12 bureacracy is heavily oriented toward top-down control over textbook selection, and they actually want to impose a two-year freeze on digital texts once they're approved, so that the books won't change after having been blessed as conforming to state standards.

And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks.

Huh? This "can't" be delivered by open textbooks? This is particularly off base. In fact, automatic electronic grading was pioneered by open-source folks at universities. One of the first systems used for math and physics was LON-CAPA, which is open-source software that was first developed about 20 years ago at MSU, and is still being actively developed and supported. Here is a list of some open-source software for this type of thing. What's changed within the last few years is that the publishers have started offering these things as services that students have to pay for, and promoting them heavily in publications like The Physics Teacher. So if all you've been exposed to is sales reps' pitches, I can see how you'd be under the impression that it only exists in proprietary form, but that's completely inaccurate.

The teachers editions I've seen only gave answers, not solutions (these have all been math books, I can't speak for other subjects). Solution manuals also generally skip steps, making them generally useful only to people who already understand the problem in a general sense, but are just stuck on that particular one.

In my 8 years of tutoring college level math and physics, I can't count the number of times I've been asked to explain the solution given in the solution manual.

I have taken classes using an open source textbook, and frankly the problems you're concerned with simply weren't an issue. Those classes were the 2nd and 3rd parts of the standard engineering physics series, using the book Simple Nature. To my knowledge there is no teacher's edition. There is an online tool to check your answers on about 2/3 of the problems; the rest are conceptual, so it's not really feasible to automate those. It doesn't give you the answer, just tells you if you're right or wrong, and sometimes gives you hints (like if you have an order of magnitude error). The author was my instructor, but I see no reason why they wouldn't be used similarly by the other instructors who have adopted them.

Note that I took the first part (Mechanics) at a different school, using a standard textbook. IMO, Simple Nature is far superior if you're goal is to actually learn and understand physics. It isn't chock-full of nifty engineering style diagrams like most Physics textbooks though, so I imaging there is a certain class of instructor that it won't appeal to.

I recently had another class where the text book was distributed free in PDF form (a lower division math class: Strategies of Proof). The book did not include the exercises, homework problems were posted on blackboard by the professor in .doc. As far as I know the instructor wrote them herself, though I can't say how much she may have borrowed from previous semesters.

It's not that big of a deal for someone who knows enough about the subject to change a constant or two in an existing problem, and that can easily be enough to completely throw off a beginner.

Nice article -- thanks for providing the link! I liked this: "There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text. If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly."

This is not a hard problem to solve in the case of email and web pages, which can have encoding given in headers. (If you validate your page using the w3c validator, it will warn you if you didn't supply an encoding.) It's also not an insanely hard problem for strings in memory; the encoding can be either set by your encoding convention or handled behind the scenes by your language (as in perl).

What really sucks is files. For instance, I wrote this extremely simple terminal-based personal calendar program in perl, and it's actually attracted a decent number of users. It's internationalized in 11 languages. Well, one day a user sends me an email complaining that the program is giving him mysterious error messages. He sends me his calendar file, which is a plain text file with some Swedish in it. I run the program on my machine with his calendar file, and it works fine. I can't reproduce the bug. We go through a few rounds of confused communication before I finally realize that he must have had the file encoded in Latin-1 on his end, whereas my program is documented as requiring utf-8. So now my program has to include the following cruft:

sub file_is_valid_utf8 {
my $f = shift;
open(F,"<:raw",$f) or return 0;
local $/;
my $x=<F>;
close F;
return is_valid_utf8($x);
}

# What's passed to this routine has to be a stream of bytes, not a utf8 string in which the characters are complete utf8 characters.
# That's why you typically want to call file_is_valid_utf8 rather than calling this directly.
sub is_valid_utf8 {
my $x = shift;
return utf8::decode(my $dummy = $x);
}

Yech. It requires reading the file twice, and it's not even 100% reliable.

This is the kind of situation where the Unix philosophy, based on plain text files and little programs that read and write them, really runs into a problem. With hindsight, it would have been really, really helpful if Unix filesystems could have included just a smidgen more metadata, enough to specify the character encoding.

How many colleges are using your book as their primary text? My guess is that you are doing it as a hobby, haven't ever been paid for it and if any students are using your text they are probably your own because you run a course and set the textbook to your own.

57. Here is the list.

Apparently he guessed wrong.

How many colleges are using your book as their primary text? My guess is that you are doing it as a hobby, haven't ever been paid for it and if any students are using your text they are probably your own because you run a course and set the textbook to your own.

57. Here is the list.

No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.

You're free to make that choice. But:

(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)

(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.

No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.

You're free to make that choice. But:

(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)

(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.

I'm participating in the CLRN Free Digital Textbook Initiative as the author of a physics book. When this was discussed on slashdot recently, I posted skeptically. The same day, I got an email from Brian Bridges, the director of CLRN, saying that he'd seen my slashdot post, and he wanted to reassure me that it really was going to happen. They'd already made a list of potential candidates who they wanted submissions from, and I was on it. I had to go through my books and figure out how they correlated with the list of topics (Word document) that the state standards say are supposed to be covered in high school physics. Then there was a process where I had to set up an account on their server, fill out some online forms, and upload the Word file showing how my topics correlated with the standards.

There does seem to be somewhat of a fog of uncertainty surrounding this whole thing. One thing I've noticed is that although Schwarzenegger has named three top-level state education officials who are supposed to carry this out, some of these people are actually his political opponents. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is all motivated by the hellish California state budget situation. This article has some useful information about California's dysfunctional textbook selection system, and a previous, unsuccessful free-textbook effort called COSTP, where the state tried to produce a history textbook via wikibooks.org. The present effort seems to be doing a pretty good job of eliminating the bureaucratic obstacles; Bridges sent me a detailed email explaining how to fill out all the forms, saying what it was safe to leave blank, etc.

One thing that I wasn't very clear on before was whether they envisioned this as something that would involve traditional textbook publishers, individual authors who'd put their own stuff on the web, or both. Although I'm sure they don't want to arbitrarily tell certain private entities, like the traditional publishers, that they can't participate, it seems clear to me now that it's aimed at the nontraditional folks like me. Note the word "free" in the name of the initiative. No traditional publisher is going to give their book away for free in digital form. It's true that the big college and high school textbook publishers are very actively involved in an effort to distribute a lot of their books in digital form, but not for free. From what I've observed at the community college where I teach, the idea seems to be to get students to rent DRM'd textbooks. When the student stops paying the rent, they can no longer use the book. This would have the effect of eliminating the used book market, which the publishers hate with a passion. (That's the reason they bring out new editions so frequently.) So no, I don't think any traditional publishers will participate. The general picture really does seem to be that they're doing this as an alternative to the traditional publishers. Further circumstantial evidence comes from the fact that the state has already tried to do a collaboration with wikibooks. One big question in my mind is whether there will be a giant push-back from the traditional publishers to keep this from happening. Seems like a no-brainer if it really advances to the stage where their market is threatened.

A lot of the slashdot posts so far have been about the issue of how students will access the books. Since the initiative has "Free" in the name, I don't think we're going to see too many barriers to access here (rentals, DRM, logging in to a web site to access the book, etc.). Taking my own books as

I bought one of the first $200 Everex gPC boxes (reviewed here), and although their linux distro was awful at that time (it was a prerelease version), the hardware has worked fine. I put ubuntu on it, and it's a great machine.

However, they seem to have recurring problems with production and/or distribution channels. They were originally selling them through Walmart; you'd order it via Walmart's web site, and it would be shipped to your local store for you to pick up. Now Walmart no longer has them. If you go to everex.com, they proudly tell you that their latest version, the gPC3, is available for $199. But of the two links they offer for buying it, neither actually works. One is to newegg, which lists it as a "Deactivated Item." The other is a link to a nonexistent page on everexstore.com.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the recurring pattern. Fry's sold the $180-250 Great Quality machines, then stopped. Sears had the Mirus with Freespire (ugh) for $200, but now they only sell it with Windows. Now the gPC seems to be headed down the same road. It seems like lots of people get this great idea of selling a linux box for $200, but nobody seems to be able to sustain it as a business model. It probably doesn't help that they all put the world's lousiest linux distros on their machines, instead of just going with Ubuntu, which would be the sane, obvious choice these days.

The timeline is really goofy. This press release from last week appears to be the request by the government for content, and they say they want it for fall 2009. Huh!?!? The press release refers to "free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students" and says the government will "develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science." Textbook publishers with books already on the market obviously aren't going to make their books free and open source. Individuals clearly can't start writing new ones and get them done by fall 2009. So the only possibility left is apparently to look for free books that already exist. That's fine (see my sig for a catalog of free books), but I think it's extremely unlikely that there are any preexisting free books that meet the state standards, which, as the Ars article points out, are insanely difficult to comply with.

I teach physics at a community college in California, and I'm the author of some open-source physics textbooks. They're intended for the college level, but I do get quite a few of my adoptions from high schools (see the list on that page). So far, however, zero of my adoptions have been from California public high schools. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to understand why: California's textbook selection system makes it impossible. Actually most of my high school users are at private religious schools. I assume that's because private schools aren't regulated by their state governments in terms of textbook adoption, and they also usually operate on a shoestring, so free textbooks sound like a good deal to them.

Re the wiki approach, it's a dismal failure at producing useful textbooks. If you look at the catalog linked to from my sig, there are hundreds of textbooks in it, and very few of them were made via wikis. Wikibooks' original goal was to revolutionize education; in reality it seems like the killer app for Wikibooks is video game guides. Plenty of people are writing free books. They're just not doing it using wikis. A textbook is an entirely different kind of project than an encyclopedia.

So what can you do to help facilitate the move away from SHA-1?

One specific thing that would really help would be if debian would make it a priority to do a complete job of packaging the relevant hash functions, along with bindings for popular languages. For instance, I have an open-source perl app that uses digital watermarks. The user can choose between SHA1 and Whirlpool. However, I want to keep my app simple for users to install, and the perl binding for Whirlpool hasn't been packaged for debian yet, so I've made SHA1 the default. A debian user who wants to use Whirlpool with my app has to jump through hoops, e.g., installing the perl module via CPAN. That's actually a real pain for a debian or ubuntu user, because CPAN and apt don't play nicely; you can get in all kinds of screwed-up states if you try to install half your perl modules using apt and half using CPAN.

TFA is talking about gpg. Well, realistically, the choice of hash function is not the bottleneck in terms of security when it comes to sending encrypted or signed email. The bottleneck is mainly just that it's too hard to use (isn't built in to most GUI email clients), and in the case of encryption it also suffers from negative network effects -- there's no big benefit to me from using gpg encryption in my email unless the people I'm communicating also use the technology. The world's best crypto doesn't do you any good if you don't use it because it's too much of a pain. I think gpg is clearly a case where the perfect has been the enemy of the good. They've been so hung up on protecting the user against obscure vulnerabilities that they've ended up making the darn thing too hard for the vast majority of users. The docs, last time I checked, were basically written in Martian. I have a bachelor's degree in math, I program computers as a hobby, and I've read Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I'm not claiming that makes me a big expert on crypto, but it does put me out in front of the vast majority of the population. Well, I simply cannot figure out all the ins and outs of gpg. Okay, I could, but it would take more time than I'm willing to invest.

My advice would be not to make an affectation of reading original works. Here is a good article that discusses this "Great Books" paradigm, and points out how poorly it fits in the sciences especially.

One example you gave was Newton's Principia. Well, I'm a physicist, and I've read most of the Principia. I would not recommend it to anyone. First off, it's all written in the language of Euclidean geometry, merely because most of Newton's audience wasn't familiar with algebra, and certainly not with calculus, which had only been published a few years before the Principia came out. Today, the way to approach the subject is to read a treatment that uses modern math that you're familiar with. If you know calculus and analytic geometry, you can read a two-page proof of the elliptical orbit law, a result that took Newton the bulk of his entire book to prove because of the mathematical tools to which he limited himself.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I think the first 1/3 of Euclid's Elements is still something that everyone interested in mathematics should read.

If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn't exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they're both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license. GFDL sucks for a variety of reasons:

1. It's long.
2. It's got a windbaggy ideological preamble; people shouldn't be forced to put their support behind a particular politically loaded credo just because they want to contribute to WP.
3. Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections. This creates confusion, and has also caused lots of smart people to waste amazing amounts of time arguing and worrying about it, e.g., Debian wrangled for months before eventually deciding to exclude certain documentation that was under non-free versions of the GFDL.

CC-BY-SA is far more widely used at this point. Switching to CC-BY-SA eliminates legal hassles that would otherwise be involved in making derived workds using WP. As a concrete example, I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed books, and when I want to use a photo or something from WP, the GFDL licensing creates hassles. I ended up having to dual-license the books, and that shouldn't be necessary. If people want to use the commons (both putting in and taking out), there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing so.

Plenty of people have already posted about the legal aspects of why relicensing is possible, but the long and the short of it is that relicensing complies with both the letter and the spirit of the law. It complies with the letter of the law because of the later version clause. It complies with it in spirit because GFDL and CC-BY-SA are similar types of licenses, just implemented badly in one case and well in the other.

Hopefully Google will realize that most everything published had, as a condition of publication, the loss of the author's rights to that work either temporarily or permanently.

Well, no. It's quite common for authors to retain copyright when they sign a contract with a publisher. For instance, here is a list of some short stories I've had published. Some of these were published in print magazines, some in electronic magazines. None of them asked me for a copyright assignment. Whether or not a publisher requires a copyright assignment depends completely on the publisher, the genre, and the customs of that particular market segment. I pulled the first three books off of the bookshelf next to my computer. How to Brew, by John Palmer, is (c) John Palmer. Programming Perl, by Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant, os (c) O'Reilly. Pragmatic Version Control, by Travis Swicegood, is (c) Travis Swicegood. So your "most everything published" is has a batting average of 1/3 in my sample.

If Google really wants to digitize books en masse, why not start by killing the concept of the exclusive contract and the equally nefarious "work for hire" clauses that are cropping up around the world

Lots of problems with your suggestion:

1. They're digitizing books that have already been published. You can't change the contracts retroactively.
2. The reason print publishers require exclusive contracts is that printing costs are almost entirely setup costs. Once you have the job set up on a traditional (not POD) press, the incremental cost of producing one more copy is very small. So the nature of publishing is that you invest a lot of capital up front in order to publish a particular book, and then you hope to make it back over time. The publisher wants an exclusive contract so that they can't be undercut by some other publisher.
3. These exclusive contracts don't last forever. I have one sitting in my drawer for a story I sold to Dell Magazines. It states "The Seller agrees he will not permit any other publication of the Work [...] until one month after first publication of the Work in the Publisher's magazine." Since the story was publisher more than a month ago, and since they didn't require a copyright assignment, I'm now free to do whatever I like with it. The books that Google is scanning are mostly out of print, and almost all book contracts provide that when the book goes out of print, the exclusive contract is terminated, and the copyright assignment (if any) reverts to the author.

Ubuntu is simply the sane thing to put on a desktop machine these days, especially for users who may not already be familiar with Linux.

It was always really frustrating to me in the past to see hardware companies selling machines with Linux preinstalled, but with some crappy version of Linux that was bound to create a bad impression of Linux in general.

Back when Fry's was selling Great Quality boxes for as low as $180, I bought several of them. They had something called ThizLinux on them, which was apparently a distro that GQ created themselves. No documentation for ThizLinux came with the machine, and googling for ThizLinux turned up a Chinese-language web site with no English translation. The printed docs that came with the machines were actually 90% information on how to wipe ThizLinux off your hard disk and install Windows. The impression any user would get from this was probably that Linux was crap, and nobody really wanted it.

Same deal with the Everex gPC, which I reviewed a while back. This may be a little unfair, because what I bought from them was a beta of their gOS distro, and now they have a newer version out, but basically it sucked, and I very quickly decided to replace it with Ubuntu. IMO it was just foolish of Everex to put out their own distro. I think they were imagining that by making it look slick (and a lot like MacOS) they would attract users. But in reality it worked so poorly that I think they were shooting themselves in the foot.

Has anyone tried this yet, though?

I tried it in Nov. 2007, and wrote this review. At that time, gOS was by far the worst part of the WalMart PC that came with gOS preinstalled. I don't know how much that's improved since then. Their site says this is the third revision of the OS. I did notice that in the new screenshots, they've fixed one annoying usability problem I encountered, which was that the three buttons to maximize, kill, and minimize a window all looked the same. One thing to watch out for is that at that time, they had their WM available as a package you could install on top of Ubuntu, but if you did that, it would replace the gdm login screen with one that prevented you from starting any other WM, so even if you wanted to go back to Gnome, you couldn't do it without locating an obscure configuration file and editing it by hand.

Why reinventing warm water?
Go to Light and Matter for a high quality book set about physics.
By the way, CK-12,org already has one.

What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?

Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.

Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1], [2], [3], [4].

I think we're currently in a period of marketplace chaos, and when the dust settles we'll find that a $1000 PC in a tower case seems about as archaic as a radio in a wooden case the size of a washing machine.

The biggest computer manufacturers are still selling machines in the $1000 price range. If you look inside, you'll see that these machines are typically mostly air inside. They could have been put in a package the size of a hardcover book, but consumers associate the big case with a powerful machine. Part of the reason these machines cost so much is profit-taking by the manufacturers, and part of it is the artificial impetus to get insanely powerful hardware, because software like Vista and OOo is coded so inefficiently. This whole setup is a house of cards, though. People don't need the equivalent of a 1990 supercomputer in order to send email and do their word-processing.

The trouble is that although a lot of small manufacturers have been testing the waters with lower-priced machines, the big ones haven't been interested. This is partly analogous to compact cars versus SUVs -- the profit margin on an SUV can be as much as $15,000, whereas the profit margin on a Ford Focus might be under $1000. Even if there's demand for the Focus, Ford has been more interested in pushing the SUV, because that's where the profit was. Then you have Apple selling a tightly integrated package of hardware and software, which people are willing to pay big premiums for. There's also the Windows tax, which hides the vast differences in hardware cost between a bleeding edge machine and something with lower specs.

For a long time, the only low-cost PCs I was ever able to find in retail outlets were the Great Quality PCs sold at Fry's, which came with Linux preinstalled. They were wonderful machines, and I still have a bunch of them in a lab at school, working great. They sold for about $200. However, Fry's stopped carrying them about a year ago. Apparently the high rate of returns was eliminating their profit margin. A lot of users were buying them to put pirated copies of Windows on, and then if they had a problem with the install, they'd return the machine.

There's also the Everex gPC. I own one, and reviewed it. Perfectly reasonable hardware, although the linux distro they put on it was junk. Judging from the customer feedback on WalMart's site, they've been some of the same problems as Great Quality with keeping their gPC customers satisfied -- a lot of people buying them apparently don't understand that the machine they're buying doesn't do Microsoft.

It's great to see something like the CherryPal come out. One interesting thing about it is that they're exploring the low end of the hardware specs that are necessary to run a web browser. This is conceivably a way for them to get around the low profit margins that have so far crippled investment in this end of the market. Here's a comparison of the specs of three cheap consumer linux boxes:

Linksys WRT54G 4.0 router -- 200 MHz, 16 MB ram, 4 MB SSD
CherryPal -- 400 MHz, 256 MB ram, 4 GB SSD
gPC -- 1500 MHz, 512 MB ram, 80 GB HD

The Linksys v. 4 router cost something like $50 when it was available. (Later versions downgraded the specs and used a different OS instead of Linux.) Let's estimate what it would have cost today to upgrade its specs to something more like a desktop system (assuming it had been an upgradable system, which it wasn't). Paying retail today it would cost me $45 for a 1.8 GHz celeron cpu, $23 for 512 MB of ram, and $15 for a 4 GB keychain drive. Adding that on to the $50 retail price of the router, you get $133. Of course a computer manufacturer wouldn't be paying anything like these retail prices for the parts, so this is really a vast overestimate of what it would cost to manufacture a system like the CherryPal. I suspect their manufacturing price is more like $50.

If he doesn't know much about physics, the Light and Matter series is worth a try. As a bonus, it's free (libre).

Gravity.

No, that's incorrect. In space travel, the vehicle is in some orbit, and in the absence of a force other than gravity, it's just going to continue in that (typically elliptical) orbit forever. Say you're going to Mars, for instance. You needed to match orbits with Mars, which means you're in the same nearly circualr orbit around the sun that Mars is in. (Of course you also have to insert yourself into orbit around Mars, and get yourself out of that orbit as well, but let's not worry about that for now.) Once you're ready to leave, you don't just wait for the sun's gravity to pull you downhill back to Earth. You're in a circular orbit whose radius is greater than that of the Earth's orbit, so you're not coming back toward the sun unless you can reduce your velocity.

To understand how you'd really use a solar sail, let's start with the case where you just want to increase your distance from the sun. Intuitively, you'd think that you'd just orient the sail perpendicular to the sun's rays, and let it thrust you outward. However, that doesn't work, because the thrust from the sunlight is orders of magnitude less than the sun's gravitational force. Doing that would be sort of like dialing down the strength of the sun's gravity by some tiny percentage, which would alter your orbit for a given velocity vector, but only by a tiny amount.

What you actually do is to point your sail at an angle. The sunlight's thrust then has both a radial component and a tangential component. The tangential component does mechanical work, because it operates in the same direction as the motion of the vehicle. That means it increases the vehicle's kinetic energy. The higher-energy orbit takes you farther out away from the sun.

When you want to come back, you do something similar, but you tilt the sail the opposite way. The tangential component is now in the opposite direction compared to your motion, so it does negative work, reducing your kinetic energy.

This web page has an example that calculates the optimal angle to tilt the sail at.

Gravity.

No, that's incorrect. In space travel, the vehicle is in some orbit, and in the absence of a force other than gravity, it's just going to continue in that (typically elliptical) orbit forever. Say you're going to Mars, for instance. You needed to match orbits with Mars, which means you're in the same nearly circualr orbit around the sun that Mars is in. (Of course you also have to insert yourself into orbit around Mars, and get yourself out of that orbit as well, but let's not worry about that for now.) Once you're ready to leave, you don't just wait for the sun's gravity to pull you downhill back to Earth. You're in a circular orbit whose radius is greater than that of the Earth's orbit, so you're not coming back toward the sun unless you can reduce your velocity.

To understand how you'd really use a solar sail, let's start with the case where you just want to increase your distance from the sun. Intuitively, you'd think that you'd just orient the sail perpendicular to the sun's rays, and let it thrust you outward. However, that doesn't work, because the thrust from the sunlight is orders of magnitude less than the sun's gravitational force. Doing that would be sort of like dialing down the strength of the sun's gravity by some tiny percentage, which would alter your orbit for a given velocity vector, but only by a tiny amount.

What you actually do is to point your sail at an angle. The sunlight's thrust then has both a radial component and a tangential component. The tangential component does mechanical work, because it operates in the same direction as the motion of the vehicle. That means it increases the vehicle's kinetic energy. The higher-energy orbit takes you farther out away from the sun.

When you want to come back, you do something similar, but you tilt the sail the opposite way. The tangential component is now in the opposite direction compared to your motion, so it does negative work, reducing your kinetic energy.

This web page has an example that calculates the optimal angle to tilt the sail at.

Java and XML are similar in that both of them got over-hyped. They're also similar in that sometimes they really are the right solution -- just not as often as PHBs seem to think. I've had exactly one application where I started designing the file format, and realized, "Oh heck, I'm reinventing XML," so I went with XML and it was the right choice. For config files, the advantage I can see is that although XML may not be optimal for every type of config file, it does provide an alternative to the traditional Unix philosophy of having a different, goofy syntax for every single program's config file. Re Java, what was really a disaster, in hindsight, was applets. They were overhyped, the CPUs weren't fast enough to give acceptable performance, the VM and its libraries are still too huge to give attractive startup times, AWT was a botch and had to be replaced, and implementations of browser plugins still suck -- in fact, my browser crashes every single goddamn time I visit this applet. Because Sun blew it so bad with applets (with a little help from MS), we've ended up instead with the de facto standard being flash, which is basically a totally proprietary system. (Yeah, I know about Gnash, Haxe, etc. Let me know when you can buy a Flash book and make the examples work using a totally open-source software stack.)

The "laws" of science simply *describe*. They do not govern.
Here's a couple pearls I've picked up:
"Science is the attempt to come up with systematic, coherent and useful descriptions of how the natural world works."
- Chris Mack, litho guru

Science always deals with models of reality, not the ultimate nature of reality.
- http://www.lightandmatter.com/

Those other reviews are much nicer than this one. An article that does not work well with Konqueror is always a bad sign (Use Bluefish).

Another bad sign I noticed right away was that the dock's icons have been rearranged so that YouTube's icon and it's neighbor's spell out "F You", compared to normal. It's hard to say if this was intentional or not, because this one has that too. What an odd choice of screenshots to have as the one and only.

I don't think you need to make up a hypothetical, complicated, national system for writing free textbooks. Lots of free textbooks already exist; see my sig for a catalog with hundreds of examples. Here is a series of articles I've written about free books, with an emphasis on free textbooks.

The issue of peer review and quality control is a paper tiger, at least at the college level. College professors decide what books to adopt for their courses, and they do it by looking at the book and making a judgment about its quality.

Professors use the sites to distribute homework and take tests and if you don't subscribe, then you are SOL. The result is everyone needs to buy the damn book every damn semester.

You didn't say, but I'm assuming you're talking about the college level (TFA was about elementary school), and when you refer to the online homework thing, I assume you're referring to math and science courses. There are tons of free online homework systems out there. I wrote this one, which is open-source, and free for students to use. The web page for my system has links to a bunch of other open-source ones, and also to a free-as-in-beer one at UT that appears to be extremely popular. Of course professors, like everyone else in the world, are lazy. If the only homework checker they ever hear about is something proprietary like WebAssign, and if the content is all set up for them in WebAssign, then they'll probably go the path of least resistance. And once the prof has his workflow all set up with WebAssign, he's going to be reluctant to switch to something free like the UT system.

How, praytell, did you get it to work??!!

Here are my notes: http://www.lightandmatter.com/cgi-bin/meki?computer_unix#Debian,CUPS,_printing,_Brother_printer The answer to your question is that currently, I don't have network printing working. My notes describe how I got it working in Breezy. When I upgraded to Fiesty, it broke, and to fix it I had to bring back my old cups config file. When I upgraded to Gutsy, it broke again, and restoring the old config file didn't help.

Since IMSLP is down, I haven't been able to see how big their collection was or what it was like, but it sounds like it was scans of PD sheet music. While that could be very useful, it's obviously preferable to have your music in a format such as lilypond that you can edit. For example, I'm a violist, and right now I'm working on the prelude from one of the Bach cello suites. Once the score was in lilypond format, it was trivial to transpose it up an octave and put it in C clef. Then I was able to change the bowings and fingerings and get high-quality printed output. The Mutopia project collects scores in lilypond format. Werner Icking Music Archive has a lot of very high quality scores in musixtex format. I've posted some of my own PD scores here. Sure it's a lot more work than collecting scans, but in the long run it's the right way to go. I think the main barrier has been the lack of open-source music typesetting software that is a gui but can produce output as high in quality as lilypond ot musixtex can. Rosegarden (a gui that uses lilypond as a back end for typesetting) wasn't quite there the last time I looked, although it seems like the developers are working hard on it.

I've written a series of three articles (the first two of which ran on slashdot) about free books. The first article (from 2000) discusses the fact that a lot of free books were getting written, but almost none of them by open collaborations with lots of people in them (but almost none != zero). The third one (from 2005) discusses wikibooks, which has utterly failed at the group authoring model for college textbooks (which was its initially stated goal), but has done well with some other genres, such as game guides.

My list on linux:

• fluxbox - a lightweight window manager that has great performance even on old hardware
• mg - a tiny emacs clone that I use as my default editor; supports every emacs feature I ever actually use, and starts up instantly, even on older hardware
• xpdf - It drives me nuts when people whine about how PDF is evil because documents take a really long time to pop up when they click on a PDF link in their browser. Just set your browser to use xpdf instead of Adobe Reader as your default app. Opens instantly.
• dillo - nice fast web browser, works great in cases where you don't care about JS or CSS

I often find it's quicker and easier to use command-line tools rather than GUIs:

• cdrecord
• mutt for email
• ImageMagick for a lot of tasks that would be more hassle to do with Gimp
• when for my calendar (I'm the author, so I'm biased :-)

Can anyone suggest a really lightweight WYSIWYG wordprocessor for Linux, preferably one that doesn't make bloated files? I'd also like an alternative to kaddressbook that wouldn't take 9 seconds to start up on my 2.2 GHz dual-core x64.