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

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?