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OLPC and CC Free Content Drive
gnujoshua writes "In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site."
We can see who's who in academics- whether publishers will be willing to release work to third-world countries that could never possibly afford to buy it and desperately need it for their education. In America at least they can hoard journals and information and demand payment because that's how the industry works- but I'll be very impressed (and surprised) if they admit that that doesn't apply at all to donating to OLPC..
Education in desperately poor countries has too long been held back by the lack of drum-and-bass loops and slash fiction about Professor Snape and Captain Janeway.
Simply put -- why aren't we hearing about a focus on education that matters -- in the languages of those who need it most?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Peter Watts Has his Rifters series as well as Blindsight up on a CC license. Good series for those who haven't read it.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
One of the more important and not-commonly-know goals of OLPC is for electronic textbooks.
The people who stand to benefit from OLPC are popularly seen as becoming computer literate, but the real benefit is the fact that these people do not have access to textbooks.
The OLPC project, with its extremely power-efficient ebook reader mode, attemps to solve the problem of out-of-date textbooks (and no textbooks at all).
For delivery of electronic textbooks, the Worldspace satellite radio service (http://www.worldspace.com/) already offers 128 kbps for the common good. This bandwidth is available to most of the people who stand to benefit from OLPC (except South America) and is a suitable delivery platform for textbooks.
Kriston
What's needed are the professors and students to do this. So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
I took a course in Technical Business Writing for where as a final project we had to write a real manual for an existing product. That sort of class could easily churn out several good textbooks a semester.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Individual schools or libraries could host the material locally (perhaps customized) and let XO-1 users access it via wifi.
The OLPC laptops are not meant to work in isolation, they are meant to be used in combination with a school server that handles extra content and backup.
However, there is still some fixed cost to be absorbed somewhere in the chain to support the administration and management of legitimate peer review. Presently, publishers absorb this cost.
Not quite. Peer reviewers are not paid for their efforts, and the associate editors that manage them are not paid for their work. The only people that get paid in any of the journals in my discipline are the technical people responsible for actually assembling the articles, and possibly the top editor who oversees the associate editors. The actual cost of production is tiny compared to the price charged for a subscription.
A colleague of mine is involved in a small non-profit journal, and he figures he needs to charge less than half of what the mainstream journals do in order to cover his costs. Considering that the big journals will benefit from a substantially larger subscription/content ratio, they really are making out like bandits.
We have the tools within the academic and library communities to take control of our own publications, what we need is a shift in thinking, and some way to reward running a journal that is on par with the professional prestige associated with actually publishing in it.
yp.
"At the same time, how is it possible to produce those works if you need to spend your time producing something salable so that you can eat? Somebody needs to pay you for something, and the most effective way we've figured out to do that seems to be to restrict availability of what you produce to only those who can pay you for it."
;-)) as a whole, the market rules, and people pay for products they want. But it must be said that the cost for a product consist of the material, and the time/work one put in it. In this respect, digital 'products' are something outside the normal. (And, in extension, all 'IP' is.) The cost of material there is...well, none. One DOES put time/work in it - in the ORIGINAL, but that is often not in comparison to the number of digital copies that can be made. After the original, the time/work that one puts in it, is virtually nothing.
Though I do not doubt that for some (high-cost) things it would cause problems, as a general statement, there are a few answers to your question.
First of, let's not make a false dillemma; it's not a matter of all the time devoted to produce those works, or all the time devoted towards something that earns money - at least, not necessarily. One can, for instance, have another job that earns you money, and create 'art' works (or whatever) as an aside. While time is limited, it's seldom limited to the point where one has absolutely NO time left to do something else than 'work for a living'.
Secondly, while it's not always possible to have one major mecenas (as was the case in the middle ages, often), the internet also provides the possibility (at least, potentially) to have micro-payments. So, instead of one big sponsor, one can have several minor ones. As long as your product is popular, I think there is a definite chance of that. (As an example; see Freenet; it's paying a full time devl for several years now, just by what people donate to the project.)
Secondly; your assertation at the end is false. There have been examples enough where people did not need to pay for something (well, unless one goes into semantics and conclude that only the sun rises for free). It's not an absolute necessity; though of course, in our capitalistic society (which I agree works much better than a communistic one
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
'cause guess what the effort you can muster to build each reproduction is limited; you will do something else if it doesn't pay off, or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different. This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
It's more like this: if Ernie tells you that 2+3 is 5, and you etch that knowledge into a granite chunk called "the internet" and reproduce it endlessly, even after your death.
As to what you're "depriving the creator" of, how many levels do you go up? Who told Ernie? Do you owe himher a few bucks?
After you die, when people look at the stone you carved and tell others, what are you being deprived of? k, you're dead, how about your children?
It's all a bunch of nonsense, and it proceeds from ignorance about the fundamentals
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
> to recreate the most important bits of knowledge -- public sanitation and mosquito control are two big ones -- as part of an educational program
I would add sex education to the list..
Translation is hard work, and people tend to underestimate how much work it is. My physics textbooks, in English, are free online. Over the years, I've had four or five people contact me, acting extremely enthusiastic about translating them into other languages. One of them translated one chapter into French and then stopped. None of the others actually did any translation. It's the same logic as any open-source software project; although you hear a lot about collaborative development, the bazaar model, etc., actually the vast majority of OSS projects never attract any developers other than the original one.
There are also significant technical obstacles. Producing a high-quality illustrated textbook requires a fairly complicated software setup, and that means that the translators have to be able to reproduce that setup. If you're using proprietary software, you have a problem, because prospective translators aren't going to pay for a copy of it so they can have the privilege of translating a free book for free. If you're using an OSS software stack, then you have the issue that some of the OSS software for this kind of thing is not yet totally mature (e.g., Inkscape is great, but it's still quite new and under heavy development), and some of it is fairly hard to use (e.g., my LaTeX class file for my textbooks runs to 2400 lines of code, plus a few thousand more lines of custom perl scripts).
Find free books.
You are right, "most of the stuff being offered is in English." But, that is why we are asking people to collect materials and post them to the wiki. We need everyones help, this includes non-english speakers who can help us find free texts in other languages. Thank you, and if know another language besides English, please add it to the Wiki, too! -Josh
Truth Happens recently posted a link to an article that proposed ways that artists could be paid for their work in a world in which everything's free. In brief, they are
.pdf for free, but if you really like it and have the money, who wouldn't want the deluxe collector's edition with gold-engraved cover and bookmark? Or an actual DVD box to go on your shelves.
.pdf for free, but you've been following this guy's career for so long that you don't mind paying a few bucks to download the file from his server. Besides, your cash fills up his donation meter and ensures next month's update, or wins the "donation war" for what feature to implement next.
1. Immediacy -- You want something now, and you're willing to pay the artist to speed production of a work.
2. Personalization -- You want something tailored to your needs specifically, like an art request, or a piece of Free / Open-Source Software that does what you need it to do.
3. Interpretation -- Or consultation. Like what Red Hat does, in providing paid support for free software.
4. Authenticity -- Like an artist's seal of approval, it lets you know that your recording is of the actual artist's work (and is certified virus-free).
5. Accessibility -- You could pay clearinghouses of data to keep track of all your songs and such for you. At its lowest level it's paid storage, but it could be more than that.
6. Embodiment -- Anyone can download the
7. Patronage -- You know you could download that
8. Findability -- Not everyone knows how to use P2P networks, or even wants to learn how.
Some of us get everything from the P2P networks. But others, who may not object to borrowing CDs or books from their friends, may still find getting copies of people's work anonymously to be somewhat disquieting. Moreover, they may not know how. These are often the people who buy songs from iTunes and Amazon, because $1 seems like a reasonable price to them for the service they receive.
If you think about it, part of the reason that iTunes is so successful in this age of free downloads is because it combines just about everything on the list. You get authentic recordings immediately, which are automatically sorted on your PC or Mac complete with cover art. You can find songs easily on their store, and you get personalized recommendations as to what other songs you might like. Yes, I know iTunes has DRM, but I also know a lot of people don't even think about it. It's true that we need to educate them about it, but I'm just saying it doesn't factor into their decisions.
I found the article extremely relevant, because I hope to make a living as a content creator selling e-books and physical copies thereof. Maybe what we need is more widespread awareness of how to make money? At any rate, the world I see this evolving into is one in which large, "gateway" institutions like TV stations and book publishers are fewer and farther between, but one in which large numbers of individual content creators can make a living off of their work, and have thriving microcommunities built up around each of them.