Can The Open Source Model Work For Textbooks?

Paul Maud'Dib asks: "My mother is both a teacher at a local college as well as a writer for a major textbook publisher. She has spent the last four years writing, reviewing, rewriting, sending out for reviews, rewriting again, shifting focus, and then a little more rewriting. Unfortunately, she was paired with a cowriter that had good ideas but lacked the ambition to fulfill her part of the project, leaving my mother to write practically the entire book herself. These kinds of problems--review, rewriting, collaboration--as well as the general purpose of such a book (not to make money, but for education) seem to fit quite well into the OSS development model. Not to mention the $500+ most college students would save given such a model. Yet very few, if any, real textbooks have been developed and published in such a manner. What barriers, if any, prevent such publishing and what should be done to stimulate the OSS model in textbook publishing?"

Comments

Not much incentive to do this

[scotpurl]

Considering that a "hit" textbook can bring the author in $300,000 per year in royalties -- why exactly should they do for free what could make them comfortable for the rest of their life?

Yeah, I know not all of us do things for money, but if you do the things in the beginning that make money, you'll then have enough money to do all the public good/charity/open source stuff you want.

Re:Not much incentive to do this

[JCCyC]

I like this idea. As you no doubt noticed, my main worry on the subject is content reliability. Quality stamping from trustable institutions is a good idea. Another one is to mandate a proeminent notice on altered works stating that it's altered and with a link to the original.

You know, it seems we are reinventig the wheel a little (wheel being the free documentation license concept). Not that it is a bad thing.

What about we team up and put this ideas in a formal way? We might come up with something useful.

Re:Not much incentive to do this

[JCCyC]

Considering that a "hit" textbook can bring the author in $300,000 per year in royalties -- why exactly should they do for free what could make them comfortable for the rest of their life?

Well, many people do just that for software, so why not books?

That said, I think the model for Free Books should be different. For instance, not everybody should be allowed to alter content at will (what if someone introduces a wrong formula, or a false historical event?) but copy should be free provided the work remains unadultered. Not that people can't contribute patches -- but they should pass the author's sieve.

Re:Not much incentive to do this

[Throw Away Account]

Actually, I'd argue that it's far more important that the books specifically be freely alterable, at least for the K-12 works. The current textbooks for those grades, from major publishers, are regualarly riddled with serious errors.

Worried that the historical text you download may have been altered by, say, Neo-Nazis? Certification marks from universities would give you as much assurance as you currently have with the textbook your kid brings home from school.

get rid of copyright for academic works?

[akb]

You don't mention it but I presume that you would like to see academic works under copyleft instead of copyright. It seems that the win here would be in the removal of barriers to distribution and not barriers to use of texts, as merging academic texts is not the same as merging source code texts.

Removing barriers to distribution makes perfect sense to me, academia is a publicly subsidized institution, as such its products should be available without restriction to the public. I think incorporating capitalism's incentive system in academia is dangerous. As you said, education should be the incentive, not money. Having money be the incentive causes researchers to not share their work with each other and undermines the credibility of the academic process. There was a good article in the Atlantic a while back about this, see here.

The biggest barrier that I can see is the cozy relationship between the publishers and the old boy academic network. They both can profit more under restricted distribution than open distribution. More public investment in academia would lessen the need for academics to turn to capitalism for incentive. There is some awareness of this issue afoot on campuses but there is no movement by academics that I am aware of.

Book copyleft - or copy middle:Principia Discordia

[arete]

There was at least one physical book published long ago (using the first Xerox for the 3rd? edition) called the Principia Discordia - and it was copylefted. Long before OSS. The result was that anyone could publish it - and you were free to make copies of it.

This didn't make it free, but it did make it legal to take it to Kinko's (once kinko's was invented) It has been through at least 5 publishers, most of whom seem to have added some material. But the $s work out like this: each publisher makes a small amount of money - the writers get nothing (except publicity...) You certainly COULD do this with a textbook - and I bet you could find someone to print it, since they wouldn't have to pay YOU royalties... but maybe you'd have to find a small publisher, or possibly you'd have to do it yourself (isn't that what "university press"s were all about?)

you already have the "source" to a book...

I think a more appropriate model might be traditional copyrighting and automatic non-exclusive licenses. Say you normally get $10/copy of a book as a royalty (I've no idea the realism here) instead refuse to sign an exclusivity agreement, and offer $5, or $2. Large publishers might walk away, but some probably won't... people DO publish dead people's works that aren't exclusive, so you might be able to convince them.

Then sell more than one license. Sell them online for a single copy. You can even inflate the single-copy license by calling the pub rate a volume discount.(IGNORE the fact that someone can print 50... you cannot reasonably prevent it - but sue if they SELL them without paying your license) This can work even if you don't have the original deal with any brick-and-mortar pub, but it'd work better if you start with at least one, so it exists in hard format.

Then give out electronic ones incl updates free to anyone who gives you a good critique - including refunding the fee of someone who paid for it. And advertise this fact up front.

I bet you'll have one of the best edited books ever - but I still bet you'll make less money.

- Arete

Not Open Source, but kinda sorta maybe...

[RhetoricalQuestion]

Bruce Eckel, author of both Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java (and probably a few more) has done something vaguely like this.

While writing them, he periodically posts his work-in-progress online. Anyone may download them for free. He originally posted in html and PDF, but now he posts in Word and html -- some volunteers create PDFs for him. The work is copyrighted.

However, users are encouraged to test his source code, or submit comments, corrections, ideas, etc. He incorporates these into his book. As the author, he maintains overall control of the book.

After publication, the book are available for free download (Word, html and PDF), and dead-tree versions are available for sale. You may freely distribute unmodified downloaded versions.

IMO, the books are pretty good, which makes me believe that this may be a workable model for textbook publishing. I don't know how well it will work for non-tech books, though.

On a cynical note, Bruce Eckel probably (disclaimer: this is totally unsubstantiated) makes his money from his seminars, and if more people have his book, more people will take his seminar, so distributing it for free makes for a good business move.

How would I turn them in for credit ...

[human bean]

at the end of the semester?

Tangibility is probably the first problem.

[dmorin]

I think that a key issue with open source anything is that you're starting with the assumption that the audience knows such a thing exists even though there is no store they can walk into, no package they can hold in their hands. It's true for software right now, which is probably one reason my dad doesn't run open source software -- he'd simply have no idea where to begin looking.

I expect that a similar problem would occur with textbooks. Since it would cost money to print them, I assume that your open source books would be online/downloadable in some sort of format. Where? Will a school be able to designate a single site where they can tell students "Ok, go here and download all your books?" or will all teachers have their own personal favorites, sending students all around the net looking? What happens to the student that runs Linux who needs to hit a site that only runs on Windows/IE in order to get a book? What will the standard be that determines which open source projects are acceptible classroom material? I would expect that in at least some instances books need to have some sort of certification or seal of approval before teachers bring them into the classroom.

Will you need DOC files for history, PDF for sociology and RB (Rocket eBook) for calculus? A recent slashdot article asked about the frightening prospect of having a standard (such as DOC) that could outlive the software that it's dependent upon, but if you gave teachers their way you're likely to find that DOC is what they'd prefer to use. Remember these are writers, not net geeks. (The time I tried to send in a magazine article in Wordperfect format because I'd written it on Linux, I got screamed at by my editor. It was a Linux article!)

And can you imagine the traffic jam when the vast majority of your freshman class all tries to print out all of their textbooks on the network printer simultaneously?