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.

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.

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.

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.