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."

Comments

Prizes Instead of Pay

[ohnocitizen]

Look this is an admirable goal, an effort to bring down the cost of undergraduate education (and make materials more readily available to the public). But this trend of offering small prizes in exchange for creative/academic work is a race to the bottom. How long until the private sector tries this with more and more jobs? Its taking the 99designs approach to academia.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[shaitand]

Why is it good for a corporation to charge as much as the market will bear for a book but not good for the market to pay as little as possible for one?

$20k is also actually not a low fee for a book. You need to sell a good 100k copies to see in that ballpark with a traditional publisher.

Re:Prizes Instead of Pay

[chichilalescu]

For now I'm a postdoc, but I plan to teach someday. When I do that, I think it would be common sense to have a set of lecture notes, and I think it would be quite natural to turn these lecture notes into a book. It is my understanding that people usually do this when they teach a course on the problems they're researching. Thus I am already getting payed for writing the book (because I get payed as a teacher), and the book should be distributed freely once it's written.

The prize should not be an incentive to generate the book...

Re:Free?

[BasilBrush]

I'm all for text-books being free. So long as the academic that wrote it was somehow paid at a suitable rate for the time he spent creating it.

A competition tends to mean X people create a work, and X-1 people don't get paid anything for that work. Its a morally vacuous way of getting work done on the cheap, whilst wasting most peoples time. It's neither socialist nor capitalist, but more closely fits slavery.