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DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-viewing-methods-needed dept.

bcrowell writes "The New York Times reports that textbook publishers are backing off somewhat on the level of DRM used in the electronic editions of their textbooks. They no longer become unreadable after a certain amount of time, as in RMS's famous essay The Right to Read. Even so, most students aren't interested, because the books can't be sold back; the solution, however, may be to make it impossible to return printed books either. No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free books."

3 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As a college student... by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 5, Informative

    The worst that I ever saw was when the prof wrote the book, which contained a tear-out sheet of problems, and refused to accept copies of the sheet - only the original. The on-campus bookstore then refused to buy back the book because it was incomplete.

  2. ~5000 hours of open courseware coming soon by MichaelPenne · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the UK's Open University. These folks spend over 1 million pounds on a course, with textbook, video, multimedia, etc.

    They're working to release this as courses in Moodle format (which exports to IMS-LD) over the next year. Since these are "battleship"* lower division, high enrollment courses with top quality content, this may dramatically change the market of educational conten.

    More:
    Britain's Open University has just announced an ambitious program spend £5.65 million putting its courseware on the Internet under a Creative Commons license


    * Dr. Jason Cole, Keynote, Moodle Moot Savannah 2006
  3. I am a college professor by vnvenkat · · Score: 5, Informative

    And for teaching a course on Compilers, I used the now-classic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201100886/sr=8-1 /qid=1145828128/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6472017-6203054?_ encoding=UTF8dragon book. The advertisement said that the new edition was revised, but not in the print copy; the new chapters were available online as an electronic book for anyone who purchases the book. The additional cost for this e-book was about $40 (not optional). To my horrid disappointment, when I went online (much later, after I started teaching the class), I found that the digital copy could only be viewed with some Macromedia-Flash like software on the browser, which would only allow you to view it page by page, no search, and no printing or saving the entire file either locally. There were no options to increase the font sizes for viewing the document comfortably either. I felt sorry for my students and apologized to them, and after the semester gets over, am planning to write to the authors of the text book to look into the matter.