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Saylor Foundation Awards Prizes To Free College Textbooks
Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."
Somebody in a third-world country.
Seriously. I am an academician in UNAM (Mexico; largest Spanish-speaking university in the world). A beginning academician as myself earns about US$1500 a month, and the best payed academicians in UNAM will get... Up to 10 times as much. I published a book this year (granted, a book of research results on Free Software and similar communities, not a textbook), and it took me approx. ¼ of my time for 18 months. The university does not pay me royalties on sold copies (and that's part of the reason I negotiated for it to be a free CC-BY-SA book).
If the prize is not too distant from a year worth of qualified job income... Hell, it's a very interesting job to take!
"nobody is going to create a (quality) textbook for free."
http://www.lightandmatter.com/books.html
http://lightandmatter.com/french/
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/
http://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/ (an extended, on-line version of the University of Toronto's long-time textbook "Representative Poetry")
Keep in mind that many of the textbooks assigned for English classes are classic books, now public domain.
Look at it this way: a professor is going to put together the equivalent of a textbook in handouts and lecture notes anyway, over the years. They don't necessarily think it will make them money in a crowded market. Many, in those circumstances, wouldn't mind sharing, and would keep it up to date for their own use. If they bring in a few like-minded souls, they could keep it up to date just like an open-source programming project.