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New Bill Proposes Open Source Requirement for Publicly Funded Books
fsufitch writes "On September 30th, the 'Open College Textbook Act of 2009' was introduced to the Senate and referred to committee. The bill proposes that all educational materials published or produced using federal funds need to be published under open licenses. The reasoning behind it takes into account the changing way information is distributed because of the Internet, the high price of college and textbooks, and the dangerously low college graduation rates in the US. Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
This is a laudable notion, but it has a huge loophole: how do we determine that the time an author spent working on a book was funded by the government? Consider a university scientist on an NSF grant. Such a scientist is typically paid salary off the grant for two months per year, with nine months paid in university salary, and one month not at all. The scientist files grant progress reports every year indicating what she did with the grant money, aside from surfing porn. If she doesn't want to open-source a book, she simply doesn't claim it as a grant-related activity, and instead publishes it for-profit and keeps the royalties.
I suspect that this will only result in academic books being open-sourced which were already published at a loss, for example by university presses. Anything likely to make a substantial profit will still be closed source.
First Hand Evidence: I had a textbook for a music theory class that was two years old. It was IDENTICAL to the current edition; they were switching two chapters in the front of the book every year as a means of planned obsolescence, so as long as you had an odd-year printed book during an odd year (or even/even) you were ok.
"sell it for $100+"
I see you haven't been in college in awhile. $100 is fucking cheap. Book now are at LEAST $175. Books that might actually be useful after college (some are great for reference) are $225 and up. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here. That's literally what they cost.
Every new addition has slightly different problem sets and the chapters are rearranged quite a lot. If you've ever taken a look at a book in its 10th or high edition you'll notice that the professor's syllabus for the book is "chapters: 5,4,8,9,1,15" IN THAT ORDER. This is because the first few editions of the book were laid out logically and the updates had significant content. After a few revisions, there isn't much to change and therefore no reason to buy the book. They go ahead and rearrange chapters so that attempting to use an old book will result in lots of confusion when trying to find the homework chapters/reading/problems.
Profs. hate this just as much as the students do because they have to constantly rework their syllabus to fit the new chapters. This results in the profs wanting to use the same edition book for years and years. The book publishers figured out that this is impossible if they stop publishing their old editions. Thus, profs can't require the old book because there's nowhere to buy it.
Textbook publishers are swimming in so much cash that it's fucking absurd. It should actually be criminal. Seriously, criminal. I would support a law that required educational textbooks to be placed in the public domain after the original author stops publishing them (and of course define a minimum publishing quantity). There would be plenty of people that would publish and sell these "old" books just above cost.
This would solve everything actually. Textbook publishers would have to add content to their books for people to want to buy the newest editions... what a shocking concept.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the shitty "online content" that comes bundles with a lot of these books. It's either a CD that has some animations (software is windows only, of course) or, more recently, an "online access code" that gives you the ability to access a few animations/problems online. The CD isn't going to work in a few years because it won't support the new OS, the internet code is only good for a semester. In either case, it's just a scam to add another $20-40 to the overall price of the book.
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