Slashdot Mirror
Do Open-Source Books Work?
bcrowell writes: "Whose version of the digital book is destined for world conquest?
Pure and virtuous open-source books don't seem to have spread
beyond the computer-science ghetto, while the dark side of the
force is represented by the advent of
mandatory antibooks in dental school.
This
article aims to move beyond the moralizing and tackle
the real issues that are playing out in the free-book arena." Interesting to see this article come from someone who has himself written such a book.
Easy -- Clipboard and Form into the same device...for government bureaucracies to give to people (like @ the DMV).
Keep in mind, once something is "digital" there really is no limit to what can be done with it...interactive editing, toggle-able highlights (and sets of highlights, catalogued by date, person, topic...), interactive searching and indexing (and saving the search and/or results)...
And of course, software enforced copyright protection via passwords, encryption, etc...
With technology that exists today (or is _easily_ implemented -- OBVIOUSLY (so fuck you patent whores)) you can read a book, highlight sections of it for your report, have the software cut-n-paste the highlights into your report, and then have a grammer+thesaurus program reword the text to make it "original"! Who says you need to "buy" term papers in college anymore? All you need to is buy the software to make term papers out of any source material, as long as that material is digital...
Keep in mind ^ 2 -- screen technology will improve...to think that the resolution of the palm is the be-all-end-all of monitors is stupid.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
- The students fail to learn it;
- The district scores deteriorate;
- People start asking, "Why aren't our kids learning?"
This is currently a big problem in science classes, where evolution is under fire from fundamentalist religious groups. It would not be terribly difficult to use examples from contemporary agricultural or public health issues (evolution of insect pests in response to agri-chemicals, evolution of pathogens under selective pressure of antibiotics) as underpinnings for the evolution section of a text. That would make it very hard to avoid, and also ground the material in issues which are familiar to the students, making it more likely to be retained.The fact that it would tend to shoot down the fundamentalists and raise lots of skeptics is completely unintentional, really, I mean it...
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Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
btw, check out OpenMind Publishing Group and OpenText Project
I tried OSing my book, and it was a miserable failure. I started out with a juicy tale about the erotic education of a 30-year-old virgin named Penelope Prood, but when I OSed it some perverts got hold of it and converted it into a boring treatise on safe sex.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How Orwellian can our government possibly get? First, they want to control what movies we watch and what games we play. Now, they want to control what we READ. How many mental casualties will it take before we protest this thought control?
PAPER BOOKS FOREVER!!!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
One of the big advantages electronic text has over printed text is price. Bits are CHEAP, and pushing them around is cheap. No million-dollar book press, no billion-dollar physical distribution system.
This makes electronic text a really good way to give consumers a taste of the book, so that you can sell them a physical copy later.
I'm reading H.G. Wells' When The Sleeper Wakes right now on my Palm Pilot. I'm already going to buy it in hardcopy, so that I have a nice, permanent version to read.
This would help publishers with one of their big problems right now: people aren't discovering new authors they like because with the high price of books, it's too expensive to experiment. Letting people try out new writers cheaply via electronic text sets consumers up to then buy hardcopy of the stuff they like.
Another nice thing about electronic text is that it is well-suited to ephemeral publishing like periodicals and software doc, because it is easy to replace with the next issue/version and you don't waste a lot of paper doing so.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Pessimism is understandable, Open Source and related concepts, frankly, sound pretty wild. I didn't used to buy Open Source as viable, but over time I began understanding it.
However, it's obvious that for different media and different situations, there will have to be different forms of Open Source. A book is like a program (involves information and perhaps instructions) but it is not a program.
Still, it's worth experimenting. I've enjoyed some of the wild non-program OS ideas here at Slashdot, and even if every last one of them turns out to be useless, they at least made me think.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
From the article:
Color printing has been getting cheaper, and full color, though still fantastically expensive to set up for production, is now considered mandatory for high school and introductory college textbooks.
Why is that mandatory? My thermodynamics book had only the barest of black-and-white line-drawing illustrations, yet it was one of the most useful books I had in college. I think a big reason why open-source books have not caught on is that many college professors write/contribute to textbooks. If your book is a Kinko's production used by your own students only, next to a full-color nationwide-selling slick-looking textbook by one of your peers, you don't get the same respect or financial gain. Content doesn't matter, so it's not really the issue. It's marketing.
Production costs for something less than the finest full-color production are incredibly cheap (since the days of Gutenberg -- the German inventor, not the web site -- black and white has always been pretty cheap), there's no reason textbooks couldn't be close to free, other than greed. We've been sold the idea that slick packaging means better education.
Maybe if every parent who pays for their kid's education made a fuss about the cost of textbooks, schools would look for other solutions.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
What next? Open Source painting?
Y'know, we never liked the ambiguity of Mona Lisa's smile, so Jimbo here painted over it.
Hacking Chaucer?
Dude, I got this sweet algorithm that totally eliminates the need for the Wife of Bath's story!
Christ on a Vespa! You can not expect to use one liscense to save the world!
Having used this book, I do think it's an excellent product. I strongly reccomend it to all Java programmers.
I don't think this is exactly the same as what is proposed in the article, but it does show there's many ways to approach distribution and availability beyond the current models.
What we will likely see n the future are several different approaches to distributing text information, not one. Different models fit different needs, areas, and people.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The verbage as I remember it was that there would be an "open"(read gratis) version available online. Has the book already been published and in stores? I would have thought there would have been a big announcement here (If not then perhaps they're in for another round of flaming? At least this article is appropriate and fairly ontopic for the subject.)
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
I attribute some of this to a thinking problem that Xerox accidentally discovered years ago. The impetus for their research into the GUI was that they were concerned that electronic documents would render the copy machine and the press useless. It turns out that desktop publishing increased our paper usage ten fold and Xerox had nothing to fear. It isn't because we can't do this stuff... people simply don't want to think differently.
I'll give an example from a place where I do contract work. Frequently I'll send email to someone in the department with answers to questions or with proposals. They print out the email and walk the peice of paper over to my desk and talk about it. They could have just responded to the email, but they don't think like that. More accurately, they choose not to think like that. Sad, but true. I don't expect people to be cold and never to talk face to face, but at the least we should use the technology for what it is good at. It is good for communication.
Although I think this is mostly a thinking problem, much like the purchase of SUVs in America, I concede that there is a technical limitation with our displays. It is simply not pleasant to read a lot of material on a CRT. I find laptop and flatscreen LCD displays to be much better, but a book is still much easier on the eyes. I'm sure this will be resolved someday, but it really won't matter unless people start disconnecting from their printers.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Everyone is making comments about online books and ebooks, which aren't the same as Open Source books. Or maybe this was just an error in the headline.
An open source book means that anyone can contribute and/or edit. That's not necessarily a good thing. Boooks are written by experts in a field. The net is crawling with "experts" which are hardly the same thing.
Pure and virtuous open-source books don't seem to have spread beyond the computer-science ghetto
...while the dark side of the force is represented by the advent of mandatory antibooks in dental school
What makes these works "virtuous"? One example of non-virtue is that I recently purchased a text for $50 because I wanted the information contained therein. Upon taking the book home and opening it, I discovered that it was an "open-source" book and that I could have recieved exactly the same information without spending $50. I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed at spending $50 for processed wood pulp. If you asked a bartender how much a glass of beer is, and he says $3 and you buy it, then he proceeds to announce all future beers on the house, you would be pissed too.
Sharing your works with others is indeed virtuous, but charging folks money for what you already intend to give them for free is immoral. If you wish for donations to support your work, then be brutally honest about it and call it a donation! (Yes, I was pissed at paying $50, but in the end it was still my own damn fault for not being informed about the book)
All schools have "mandatory" textbooks. As this is a dental school (a medical profession), I am sincerely glad that some of their texts are mandatory. However, do not mistake this use of the term "mandatory" as being non-voluntary. No one is required to attend dental school or one particular dental school. Neither are the professors required to use them.
And then there is the coined term "antibooks". Apparently this is in reference to books that are password protected and licensed. I fully agree that people should have extensive rights to their own copies of works, but you you have a licensed work, it is not your copy! You have only purchased to right to use it, you have not purchased the book itself. Again, no one is being forced to use these books.
Of course, there will be those of you saying that you are forced to because your professor assigned it, and that you just can't take another class instead. This is BS and run-of-the-mill student whining. Last I heard, the general populace was not enrolled in dental school. Apparently one must make an explicit choice of their own free will to enroll.
It seems as if in their zeal for Free Software and Open Source, the slashdot crowd has lost track of what freedom and liberty are all about. Liberty is not about getting whatever you desire and damn all who stand in your way. Liberty is about being in control of your own lives, freedoms and property. If you wish to be in partial control of another's property (a textbook or software package), you must make arrangements with that person. You are not allowed to use force to get your way. If the textbook author places terms and conditions upon the use of his property that you don't like, then don't use it. But if you do agree and take the textbook, then breach the agreement who have made, then you are a liar, and that is immoral.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
For those of you, not unlike Signal 11, who are too stupid to look more than a few weeks into the future, consider something like instead.
Your theories on market failure seem very sound. Thank you for presenting them.
However, I don't think government sponsorship of textbooks will help, because it will become a political nightmare. Imagine all of the fights over textbooks happening all at once on a national level!
Also, who is going to supervise the government's work, and what guarantee is there that the people supervising the work would have the proper discretion anyway? Frankly, just saying "the government can do it" does NOT make me think that the problems of bias and politicizing of textbooks would somehow magically go away. I don't think big government possesses the degree of wisdom and impartiality that you seem to be attributing to it. I'd rather be able to yell at my school board and get rid of the bad eggs at the next local elections, thank you.
What the government could do that would help would be to shine more light on the issues of how much of the costs of textbooks go towards for marketing and fluff. And, if there are small publishers whose work is a relative bargain, the Department of Education would be wise to set up a cheap web page pointing these kinds of bargains out to school boards and teachers.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Plain text. File extension "TXT." 'Nuff said.
sulli
RTFJ.
For instance, dropping a 4 pound physics book on the desk in front of a sleeping student who drank too much last night is a sure way to get their attention.
And then there's that couch you picked up in the garbage, so what if it's missing a leg, that's what textbooks are for.
And when you are done with college, you can hollow out one or two to keep your stash in. No underclass burglar is going to grab your copy of Differential Equations and Laplacian Equations.
This is why there will always be a need for a few double LP albums, have you ever tried to clean your stash and roll a joint on a CD?
thank you very much.
All of the current "digital books" that I've seen are a kind of tablet and you click buttons to make the pages scroll by. A big version of a palm pilot, or one of those Transmeta "web appliances". They won't replace books, because books have a quality that pure digital devices don't.
A book has texture, substance, density, weight, alot of things that make it much more physical, and therefore real, than these digital books do. If you're asking me, this is a fad. These digital books will wind up looking more like the Star Trek pads that you saw being waved about. Small palm-pilot sized devices which can interface with nearby systems (bluetooth) and upload/download information. They will have texts in them, of course, but people won't use them to read volumes - it strains the eye.
So I think the better question would be "What will these books evolve into?"
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It won't solve the "can't merge Word docs with Pagemaker docs" sort of problems (unless the authors agree up front to always write in RTF.)
John
John
It's worth noting that the author is publishing this under the Open Content Publication License as opposed to the GNU Free Documentation License which seems just as adequate.
In his foot note, the author even states, "The best known license for applying the open-source concept to other forms of expression besides computer code is the OPL." He does not explain why.
The cost of printing and distributing textbooks is fairly small. Admittedly, it is less profitable to do a small run of some huge graduate physics text than a mass market bestseller, but still, it isn't the cost of printing and distribution that makes textbooks expensive.
I've been trying for years to find out what the problem is, and as far as I can see, it's a case of simple market failure. A big textbook publisher offers a large royalty to an author to write a text, spends a lot of money marketing it, uses various forms of kickbacks and influence to get universities and school boards to buy it, and then has to charge a fortune to compensate for these costs. Smaller price publishers could enter the market, but without high pressure marketing or big names doing the writing, or claims of US Dept. of Education approval or something, they stand little chance of selling, much less making a profit on short runs.
In the end costs are high and neither publishers nor authors are seeing large profits. Important texts often go out of print. My textbook for phonetics was Ladefoged's "Course in Phonetics" - far and away the best text in the English (and several other languages) on the subject. Yet, it was out of print for 15 years because the publisher held the rights and didn't think it was profitable to print up. I used photocopies. (BTW, the book is now back in print and selling well. It's available from Amazon in paperback for $57.50 - a still obscenely high price for such a fundammental text.)
I have a proposal, but no one is going to like since it invovles spending tax money.
Government could commission textbooks from worthy authors, print them up and sell them at cost, and release them as some form of open content. (I prefer the kind of model that allows unlimited republishing, but not the kinds of modifications open source software allows. Authors want books with their names on them to say what they want them to, and not something else.) If other publishers want to reprint them and sell them, they can, but they have to compete on an open market for their editions.
I think this would have the effect of reducing prices in general. Good text writers could receive a reasonable cash payment up front, and the government has no vested interest in uselessly rereleasing modified versions, but has no motive not to update the text when it genuinely calls for updating.
Those who do write genuinely better texts and don't want to participate in this scheme can still write and publish independently. They do, however, have to have content that is really better because they have to compete with these low cost texts.
In the end, everybody gets at least a bit of money and good texts stay available. No one ever got rich writing textbooks anyway, so I think my half-loaf is better than none for everyone involved.
As for the cost to government, remember that tax money already pays for high priced texts. Most students get grants or student loans to go to college, and public school textbooks are fully paid for out of public school budgets. I think my system would cost less in the long run.
The LDP is using CVS to store its documents (DocBook SGML) and I've collaborated with other LDP authors on the LDP Authoring Guide (formerly the HOWTO-HOWTO) via CVS.
In terms of editors, there are quite a few:
PSGML for Emacs (highlighting and validation)
gvim does DocBook highlighting
LyX has some rudimentary DocBook export support
nedit supports hightlighting and validation
tksgml is more tag-oriented, but has a nice layout
WordPerfect for Windows also has an SGML mode (the Linux version apparently does not)
I give a quick mention (along with URLs) of most of the above in the LAG.
-Mark
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Funny you should mention "hacking Chaucer" and the Wife of Bath's tale.
At a symposium on "The Transformation of the Book" (which directly pertains to this conversation) at MIT, a Chaucer scholar presented the work of his group. There are some ~50 (IIRC) extant source manuscripts containing the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and these blokes put together a massively hypertextual comparative edition (on CD).
This was immediately followed by a presentation on the Perseus project in classical literature at Tufts. It was at well over a million (hand coded!) links at the time of the presentation.
The point of this is three-fold:
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Bruce Eckel's Thinking In Java is free as in speech and as in beer for the online version. The entire book is free to download and the author has consented to allowing people to print copies of the book from the online version (which is traditionally against copyright law).
He accepts corrections and updates from most people as well as sample code. In this sense it is free as in speech. Read what people have had to say about the book.
What's really cool is that the book has turned out to be so good that many people I know still ; buy the dead tree version. Best of all it doesn't use any proprietary formats but instead good old HTML.
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance
Your argument has some merit. Indeed, not everyone learns linearly. Also, the fixed, static nature of books is a detriment in a rapidly-changing information scene (look at my collection of OReilly books - I'm 2 versions out of date already.... Sigh.)
However, I'm going to take issue with you on several statements, and make some of my own:
The most immediate advantage of print is it's readability. There has been some interesting developments in digital ink (technologies where you have a white "paper" with crystals embede in it which change orientation (and look black rather than white) on application of a small charge), but even then, readability for electronic books sucks hard. You certainly can't have people reading off of LCD/CRTs for any period of time.
Durability and portability. Books never run out of power. The ability to use them as legs for your sofa is a testament to how sturdy they are. Fundamentally, until we can build a portable reading device that allows you to bash it around like a 4th-grade history book, well, electronic books are not going to be anything popular. Paper doesn't crash when you run it under water (hey, just dry it out!), erase itself when left on top of the TV or microwave, or delete itself when you accidentally hit the wrong key combo.
With respect to textbooks and changing information: in the vast majority of cases, textbooks should never be used in a rapidly fluctuating environment. Textbooks are for imparting a base knowledge level of a subject. Essentially, they are reference material. The information in them generally is not Incorrect (yes, you HS biology books from the 50s need to be tossed out, but the ones in the 80s? I think not.), rather it becomes out-of-date. Supplements and addendums are excellent ways to keep "static" textbooks relevant for years. W/R/T non-textbooks, the practice of publishing errata and updates to the original book via the Web is an excellent way to combine the advantages of print with the immediacy of the electronic (especially when you can print out the electronic updates and stick them in the back of the book!).
Alot of the debate around textbooks is really a funding issue, not a medium issue. Honestly, I'd rather see schools invest in having no textbooks older than 10 years than getting a computer for each child. Which do you thing is really better?
Also, despite about 20 years of "reformers" claiming that the linear teaching methods are stiffling our children and limiting their ability, "flexible/associated learning" is a complete, unmittigated disaster, especially in the lower grades. Linear textbook or teacher-driven learning is probably the BEST method for imparting a base understanding and fundamental knowledge of anything. A structured program where knowledge is presented in a pre-determined manner is really the only way to effectively teach a complete newbie a subject rapidly. A certain subset of the population would do better quickly switching to a more exploratory method of learning, but textbooks are aimed at the vast majority of people, most of which need structure to learn. Now, later in life (college, and probably HS), we should look to alternate methods rather than purely strict structure, but remember, you have to learn to crawl before you can run the 100m dash.
Fundamentally, the printed textbook has so many advantages over the distributed eBook-thingy that I can't see the eBook being anything more than a gizmo for decades.
Oh, and by the way, we already have "open" educational information. It's called the Internet. Look how reliable and trustworthy information that comes from it is. The editorial process provides a level of certainty that is not to be found in rapidly-changing e-texts. yes, print does occasionally have mistakes, and there is a detectible bias according to the period the book was written in. However, the constant "revision" process of e-texts means that large amounts of the text will not be fact-checked (or even consistent), as future updates will undoubtably be counted on to fix mistakes. That's OK, until they find mistakes in chunks I've already read and internalized, which means that I've got to go back and re-read it. Basically, it's rather have the information correct the first time around, rather than constantly worry that what I've read is right or maybe a mistake.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
It will take a long time before any sort of screen has the resolution of even the cheapest paperback book. 2400 or 4800 lpi printing is cheap, but even the best monitors don't usally go very much past 100 ppi. Unless we can close this gap, paper copies will be easier to read.
I'm terribly enthusiastic about OpenSource Educational Material.
Open Publications can provide us with much more than merely free and improved literature. We can apply groupware concepts to online education and build a very modular and exacting approach to education. Knowledge requirements for particular subjects can be made explicit and linked to. Community systems (such as ArsDigita's) can be applied in order to permit annotation, both textual and graphical, chat rooms (the largest study group in history), and other assistants to understanding material. Multiple explanations of the same subject can be given side-by-side. Methods of explaining can be analyzed and optimized.
OpenContent books such as Havoc's book Gnome/GTK+ Application Developmentappear to be doing well on the shelves. I haven't witnessed price wars yet; most Open Publication books are only being published by one publisher, even though there is nothing to preventing republishing. Indeed, it makes me wonder why more books are not published under free licenses.
Publishers' roles (and living) will not disappear until book compilers are commonplace, even though content may be liberated; I, and several others, severally annotate our books. (My copy of House Of Leaves has a lot more in blue than just the word "House".)
I do not forsee the death of paper books any time soon. When given a set of cdrom documentation, what do most of us do? Print it out of course. While a searchable index which is hyperlinked to the appropriate page is nice for brief reference reading. Documentation ultimately ends up in paper form because staring at a screen is too stressful for the eyes.
If e-books or whatever you want to call them become mainstream, there will be people like myself printing out the data they contain. It has proven invaluable to have hard copies of data that is truly valuable to me in the evnt of serious wrath-of-god type situations. (One can still manage to decode a book that has been through a flood, where most data media will be gone for good)
I think that we should temper our fear with reason on this front. Yes, we need to be viligant to ensure that the proper formats for these new e-books get put into place and that we don't end up with corporatized versions of books. But we should also realize that no matter what new technology comes along, it will not nor can it ever completely replace the paper book. We will need to worry when they start trying outlawing printers and printing presses to push electronic books on us though.
Anyone with serious documentation at their house knows it is hard copy (printed text on paper) that is the easiest to read.
I also have faith that anything they throw at us in an attempt to stop us from printing it out and accessing the data contained on the e-book will be circumvented. They cannot imprison information, it won't happen because people like us won't let it happen. That is the most important issue, we need to make sure that we are vocal enough now to ensure that we don't need to circumvent anything. At the same time we can't run off into hysterics though. Which is why I say we need to be careful about how we present what we know is the proper view about such new forms of books, they should be free and have the same rights of access and copying as any other books. Be that permission from the author/publisher or open source books ala project guttenberg.
RMS may be loony sometimes, but he was right in prophesizing that there would come a day when these freedoms we take for granted with books would be threatened.
These books are not the "book" equivalent of "open source software". They are mearly texts whose copyright have expired. "Open Source" works are by definition still covered by copyright.
Gutenberg is quite cool, but it only contains OLD books. For "new" work authors need to use something like the GNU's free content license or the Open Content license.
"In this climate of vanishingly thin margins, the most successful textbook is little more than a loss leader, and one with more modest sales is a disaster. Every book has to be a home run. K-12 biology books often don't mention evolution for fear of losing sales in socially conservative school districts. History books avoid controversy by propagating the myth that John Brown was insane, or by failing to mention that the Vietnam war began as a war of independence in a French colony."
So as to avoid losing sales from those who would be offended, truth is sacrificed. This is a dangerous slope upon which to stand. Since there are a myriad of opinions and sacred cows in the world, to be so focused on the money at the expense of teaching reality is to eventually reach the point where you teach nothing controversial. Only feel-good, rah-rah, aren't we wonderful material will get printed.
It's somewhat different in the general book market where a variety of opinions is still considered a good thing. But in the textbook market, I think the open source concept is needed, if only to provide an alternative to the money-above-all crowd.
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Private Essayist
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
I figure Open Source is inevitable/desirable for two reasons:
So, Open Source Books? Why not, it's worth a shot. It's better than not trying.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I'm afraid this wanders a bit, but hopefully it sparks some real thinking (the source article wanders too so I'm just being consistent :).
Crowell's article makes a fundamental assumption: that (educational) books are the best way to learn real information. I agree that books are the best way to hunker down for a nice enjoyable read, but that's not information in the educational sense, that's entertainment (however sublime the author's writing - yes it can be educational too, but let's not get into that).
For those who did not read the article: he basically goes into the fact that because the price of entry into printing is so high, that open source books, or even collaborative books for that matter which are intended to be as useful as possible (rather than as profitable as possible) don't stand much of a chance in today's markets. He also despairs over the lack of other real options (aside from Latex, which he dubs as too complicated for the average user).
What is it about printed books that makes it a superior format for textbooks and other kinds of changing information? Is it the fact that every change requires a new generation of trees to be sacrificed to propagate the update? No. It's the fact that printing is so systemized that it's become relatively cheap (compared to word of mouth and compared to computers). In fact, books are very inconvenient to use for dissemination of changing (educational or otherwise) information. Textbooks must change to keep up with changing information and to keep up with the changing demands of society. (Crowell also mentions how horrible textbooks are today and seems to imply that open source books would remedy that somewhat, but that's more of an assumption on his part which is irrelevant to the feasibility and methodology of open source texts).
As a side note: Information taught in schools is crucial to modern civilization, so this is not a trivial issue. If the medium becomes restrictive or inaccessible, then civilization's very development will be hampered. Yes, I do think that key-locked DVD textbooks are inherently evil. They should be outright illegal or legally unsupportable for intellectual property suits.
Another side note: Is information best taught in the linear format used in textbooks? Think about how you think for a moment. How does your sense of curiosity work? Maybe it's only geeks that do this (thank you, but no I personally am not a nerd), but it seems to me that our thinking about a subject will network, regardless of a subject's real complexity. Again, this branches into yet another discussion about the best way to learn, yadda, yadda, yadda; but I think the point is clear: the few of us who do think like a textbook (linearly only) are clearly at a disadvantage. (Yes, I have met in-DUH-viduals like this. It's pretty sad.)
So what now? Well, we'll probably be stuck with paper until something as accessible and just as cheap comes along. So, until those nifty plastic screens with low-energy processing units (preferably solar powered), high resolution and easily readable characters, and ubiquitous and cheap networking (for new and *open* content) become available, we're pretty much stuck. But I will go out on a limb here: those sorts of devices WILL replace paper within 50 years, and much more quickly I hope. It will become necessary primarily for economic reasons: as the price of dead-tree resources skyrockets, impetus will exist to move to this new format.
The masses will be ultimately intolerant of locked down or closed educational information. The market will adapt to allow the masses to have open content. Any solution that doesn't do this will lead to despotism.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
The solution for the creation of digital books and their dissemination for profit is the same as for the creation and dissemination of any other content.
Some form of trusted cataloguing site, some form of storage site, some form of micro-payment to collect money from the receiver and send it to the producer and that's it.
The producer can control (own and pay for,) as much or as little of the data pipeline as he wants/cares to. And unlike unregulated peer-to-peer Napster-ish chaos, we get trustworthy, evaluated if not professionally edited, content.
The elimination of the copy mechanism, and its attendant 'resource allocation' lackeys, from the pipeline between content-provider and consumer truly puts "the power of the press" in the hands of the producers and "the power of the dollar" in the hands of the consumer.
It will change publishing from a power base, a cotery and a choke point for information into a service industry.
Leibnitz would be proud...
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There are some newer books, such as the HomeBrew HomePages Put YOU On The World Wide Web, or The Hacker Crackdown. These are books which have been explictly gifted to the public domain, or to Guttenburg itself.
Many people in this level have made good points on why paper is not so wonderful.
My take is that I like to lie more than sit. You can watch TV in this position, but holding a heavy book or a big newspaper is strenuous after a while. A light electronic reader, or maybe a projection screen would be better here.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
-Daniel
Well, X years after the author's death, the "artistic expression" becomes public domain and everybody can copy and modify it.
Occidental art has actually copying from Neoclasicists that copied from the Renaissance that copied from the Romans that copied from the Greeks.
And this William Shakespeare that decided that he didn't like that Danish chronicle or this Italian novella and adapted it, and later Kurosawa or Kenneth Brannagh made thir changes as well.
Open source is just making the period of exclusivity freer.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu