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."

Comments

Good

[Brian Gordon]

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..

Re:Good

[Mateo_LeFou]

"the transformation to digital methods of production and distribution therefore poses to the twenty-first century a fundamental moral problem. If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?"

Moglen

Re:Good

[CSMatt]

If I could make a perfect copy of his car and loan out the copies, then yes.

Re:Good

[Ginger Unicorn]

it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the only reason people produced reproducible artistic works was for the love of it or the urge to express oneself, and if the only reason people produced reproducible reference texts was because they needed to use them themselves. of course this situation would be augmented by the odd occasion when people would pay someone to produce one of these works because they wanted one for themselves. i've just re-read that and realised that is exactly how free software works, so i suppose such a system would work just as well as free software has. which is very very well indeed.

More important: relevant content by language

[CodeShark]

While all of this sounds great, as far as I can tell most of the stuff being offered is in English. Which is great, but why isn't there more of a movement to recreate the most important bits of knowledge -- public sanitation and mosquito control are two big ones -- as part of an educational program that can be stuffed onto a DVD and shipped out. Why are we only hearing about college textbooks, etc. which -- hello out there? are mostly what those of us who have been in the armed services used to refer to as "chloroform in print" or whose relevancy to real world problems is scant at best?

Simply put -- why aren't we hearing about a focus on education that matters -- in the languages of those who need it most?

The not-so-commonly-known goal of OLPC

[kriston]

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.

Who needs the publishers?

[Maximum Prophet]

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.

Re:Who needs the publishers?

[bcrowell]

What's needed are the professors and students to do this.
See my sig for a whole bunch of examples that already exist.

So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
My experience is that these days, that kind of thing tends to be much more expensive and inefficient that simply putting pdfs on the web. That's what I do for my students, and self-service laser printing on campus only costs them 4 cents a page (which is basically what it costs the school for paper and toner, and is much, much less than it would cost for the ink on a home inkjet printer). If I did it through my campus's bookstore, it would cost more like 8 cents a page. Part of the reason for that is that bookstores normally operate in a system where any books they don't sell, they just return to the publisher for a full refund. But course packets can't be returned, so the bookstore has to eat the extra cost of producing any copies they produced that ended up in a dumpster. To keep from taking a loss, they raise the price. Another factor that raises costs is that the course packs are being produced by paid workers, not by students on a self-serve basis, so the price has to include that labor cost. AFAICT, there are only three reasons any professors are still doing these course packs the old-fashioned way: (a) they don't own the rights to all the materials, and are paying the publisher for permission to use them, (b) they did their materials on a typewriter in 1962, and haven't gotten around to modernizing, or (c) they want to make a royalty. I think c is completely unethical when you're selling to your own students. There's a massive conflict of interest when you can force your students to buy something that puts money in your own pocket. If you want to make royalties from your writing, then ethically you really need to make those royalties from sales to other schools.

Re:If the content is so good...

[grumbel]

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.

Re:How to fund the structure of legitimate review?

[yankpop]

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.

well...

[N3wsByt3]

"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."

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 ;-)) 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.