In Canada, at least not long ago when I was still an avid photographer, permission had to be asked of an individual before h/is/er picture was taken.
Dunno about Canada or Switzerland, but in the US, the right of publicity in most states is relatively weak:
http://www.publaw.com/rightpriv.html . Asking for permission might be a good idea, but in the US, it seems pretty clear to me (IANAL) that what google is doing isn't violating the right of publicity.
I think it's reasonable that a person has a right to vet images of them that reach the public.
Seems unreasonable to me. You're out in public. People can see you.
Extending the argument, property has value, and public posting of a property's image could impact on the property's value.
Just because a particular action can affect the value of your property, that doesn't mean that you have a legal right not to have that action taken.
Not to mention weird stuff like stalkers.
Huh? If someone's stalking you, and they know your address, you think they won't be able to get a photo of your house?
Google's gone totally Kafka.
I actually find your overly expansive view of property rights a lot scarier than anything google is doing.
IMO the really creepy stuff happens when lots of data about a particular person gets aggregated and made conveniently available. For instance, there are web sites like snitch.name that web-scrape social networking sites. Google isn't aggregating data about individuals here, and in fact they're trying pretty hard to avoid even including recognizable faces in the photos. Another creepy thing is when employers won't give Joe a job because Joe's credit rating is bad -- and then Joe can never pay off his debts, because he can't get a job. Again, it isn't google doing this.
Re energy, they come in with an informal concept of energy (food calories, etc.), and my experience is that many of their conceptual errors with force occur because they subconsciously associate that informal energy concept with the symbol F.
I see -- thanks for the info about lightning source. I didn't know they did retail order fulfillment.
First, you're right about where money should flow, but it's important to keep in mind that Lightning Source is a printer, not a publisher. They provide printing services to publishers (hence the requirement for a business number). I don't know if Booksurge/Amazon is the same, but they are certainly targeting the small publisher market.
I think we're starting to see a blurring of the lines between publishers and printers. Lulu, for example, does many of the things traditionally associated with the publisher (production, storage, distribution, retail sales, disbursing royalties to the author, a tiny bit of promotion), but doesn't do a lot of the other things a publisher would traditionally do (editorial, art, serious promotion).
Hi -- I'm the author of the book. Of course, de gustibus non est disputandum, but re "half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion)," those topics are in volume 2. It's a 6-book series.
Your examples of Baen and Tor are a little off the mark, since those are fiction publishing houses. Generally fiction publishers are never interested in reading submissions that have already been published. (Yes, there are tons of exceptions, but that's the general rule.) In academia, it's quite common for authors to release their textbooks for free online, and then get a contract with a publisher. Fifty years ago, the professor would run off copies of his book on purple mimeograph paper and test drive it with his students, debug it, and only then get it published; putting the book online for free is the modern (and ethical) way to do the same thing. I have never, ever heard of a textbook publisher having an issue with this. What does tend to happen a lot is that once the publisher is bringing out the book in print, they demand that the author take down the free download. If you look though the catalog of free books in my sig, there are probably several hundred books that used to be free, but are now marked as broken links; almost always, the situation is the one I've just described. There are publishers who are more open-minded. One example that springs to mind is that Benjamin Cummings published Sean Carroll's general relativity book, but an earlier form of the book is still available free online (without, e.g., the improved versions of the figures that the publisher produced for their edition). The basic problem is that textbook prices are wildly inflated, and resulting extremely lucrative (and exploitative) setup is not sustainable unless the publisher has a perfect iron grip over the book.
IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.
Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments...
If you want to manage an open source textbook project be warned that if you want a professor to use it you're going to have to assume the role of editor and put up your reputation to vouch for whatever goes into it.
Open-source is not the same thing as multi-author. My own physics textbooks are open-source, but I'm the only author. Open-source, in the context of a textbook, simply means it's under an appropriate copyleft license (e.g., CC-BY-SA), and it's in an open, editable format (e.g., latex). It does not mean that anyone who wants to can alter the contents of my books.
If you want to start a wiki textbook project, there's no shortage of wiki sites, but nobody is going to use it in an official capacity. Just like Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia, wiki texts don't either.
Totally wrong. This is exactly what ck12 and curriki are doing. Yes, their books have been adopted by schools. You seem to be imagining that all wikis are publicly editable. Just because something is a wiki, that doesn't mean that it's editable by anyone. For instance, the books on ck12 can't be edited unless you ask for an account and convince them you know enough to make a positive contribution. Also, "Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia" is a correct statement if you're talking about citing references. An equally true statement is "textbooks don't fly in academia" -- that is, nobody cites a textbook as a reference.
For a catalog of free and/or open-source books, see my sig. I've written some free physics textbooks, and have been fairly successful getting them adopted at colleges and high schools (scroll down on that page for a list of adoptions).
In my experience, college profs and high school teachers tend to be pretty open-minded about adopting free books. I haven't seen much evidence of any stigma associated with the fact that they're not published by a big publishing house. High school teachers at public high schools generally don't get the freedom to choose a book that hasn't been approved by the state bureaucracy, but teachers at Catholic schools and charter schools do. Most of my high school adoptions have been from private religious schools.
Promoting a self-published book is always difficult. For me it's been mostly word of mouth, but I've also paid for ads in The Physics Teacher now and then.
I started out by doing the order fulfillment myself. That was nuts. After doing that for years, I was extremely happy to have it done by lulu -- no fuss, no muss. Pros and cons of lulu:
They do the order fulfillment. That means I don't need a business license or a merchant credit card account anymore. I don't need to do sales tax returns anymore. I don't have to extend credit to customers, or nag the flaky ones to pay their bills. I don't have to worry about going on vacation in the summer when orders are going to come in. I don't have to lay out capital to print hundreds of books at a time, or fill up all the closets in my house with them.
Lulu, unlike almost all vanity presses, offers an option where you don't pay them any money initially. That option is good. Use it. People who pay a vanity press to publish their book are mostly fooling themselves. Money is supposed to flow to the author; if it flows the other way it's generally a scam. With lulu's free option you don't get an ISBN. Don't worry about it. I've never had a college bookstore or high school get upset because there was no ISBN for the book. They handle instructors' course packs, etc., that don't have ISBNs, and they're used to it.
Support is more or less nonexistent. They have forums, and the other users on those forums are often very nice, but the chances of getting a helpful response from lulu staff are pretty low in my experience.
Don't use their USPS Media Mail shipping options, and make sure to warn your customers not to use it. The books will arrive six weeks late and damaged.
I have had lots of hassles with PDFs. Often a PDF will print fine for a year, but then one day someone will place an order, the particular subcontractor that's supposed to print the books for that region will get an error, and then I have a problem. The customer gets an email saying the order couldn't be fulfilled. I get an email saying there was an error, but not what the error was. This always seems to happen when the order is some gigantic order from a big university, and I'm out of town. Not fun. To maximize your chances that the pdf will work, and work reliably, make sure that no fonts are subsetted, and that 100% of fonts are embedded. If you're generating them with ghostcript (or one of the many other pieces of software that use gs under the hood), make sure it's a recent version of gs.
It sounds like you're planning on selling to colleges. Don't underestimate the insane cheapness of impoverished college students. If your book costs significantly more in print than it would cost them to download it and print it out at Kinko's, they'll download it and print it. No, it's not logical to save thirty-seven cents by printing the book out instead of buying a nice, bound copy. Yes, they'll do it anyway. For this reason, do not expect to make any money on this project. Do it if it makes you happy. Do it if it scratches your itch. The good thing about lulu is that if you use their free option, you're guaranteed not to *lose* any money.
We've searched for his email with no luck. I responded to his comment previously on slashdot and asked for him to send me a copy of the email so we could research. He never replied. Instead of letting us fix it, he would rather be a troll."
This is extremely offensive. Not only do you have your facts wrong, but you throw in some name-calling as well. Here is my previous comment. Here is a reply from Anonymous Coward, asking me to send a copy of the email to an oreilly address. Here is my reply to that comment, in which I explained that I no longer had the email. (I generally delete spam as soon as I receive it.) Are you ready to admit that you have your facts wrong.
bcrowell - if this is a legitimate complaint, please send us a copy of the email you received from us, or your own email address, and we'll see if you've ever been on our list, and if so, make sure you aren't any more.
My email address is bcrowell at fullcoll dot edu. Removing me from your list won't be necessary, since I already have O'Reilly blocked in my spam filter. What I would like is an apology for your entirely groundless and offensive personal attacks.
Get the ISBN yourself. Don't use someone else's -- it can reduce portability. For example, a ISBN from Createspace cannot be move to anywhere else, so you're stuck on Amazon only, forever. If you have your own ISBN, you can move to Lulu (for example) or to a more conventional publisher.
This isn't quite accurate. First off, you're supposed to have a new ISBN for every edition. A book is not supposed to have a single ISBN associated with it forever, so portability is not such a big issue. Just get a new ISBN. I could be wrong, but I also don't think your example of bringing in your own ISBN to lulu works. Lulu wants to sell you an ISBN as part of one of their packages. And if you move to a conventional publisher, they're going to certainly do enough changes to the book (even if it's just the cover and binding) to require generating a new ISBN for a new edition.
There are really three options for a self-published book, each of which has its own pros and cons:
Get your own ISBN. This is what I used to do for my physics books. There are several disadvantages to this. One is that Bowker finds lots of ways to charge you money. ISBNs are relatively expensive unless you buy them in bulk. A few years back, I believe Bowker started making you to pay a yearly subscription fee for the privilege of being able to read and write to the database records associated with your ISBNs. Also, they require you to give a phone number, which they list as the phone number of the publisher. If you live in California, you'd better be ready to receive calls on that phone at 5 am from bookstores on the East Coast. Essentially I would say that is option probably makes sense if you're doing your own order fulfillment, but not otherwise.
Don't use an ISBN. This is what I'm currently doing. It's worked out fine. It prevents me from selling the books on amazon, but there's no particular reason I'd want to sell them on amazon anyway. Schools and campus bookstores order from lulu, and it's not a problem.
Get an ISBN as part of a package from a self-publishing house like lulu. I would advise against this on the general grounds that money flows to the author, and anything else is probably a scam, almost certainly a bad idea. That's why I use lulu's free level of service, which doesn't provide an ISBN.
I used to have warm, fuzzy feelings about O'Reilly and my shelf full of O'Reilly books. That was before they started spamming me. I'm a college professor, and they sent me spam trying to get me to adopt one of their physics books for my courses. This was at a.edu email address that I had never given to them -- in fact, I had no preexisting business relationship with O'Reilly at all, except for buying their books on amazon and in bricks-and-mortar bookstores (and not with that email address, either).
A related option is to have an outfit like Lulu publish the book and sell it for you. You upload a PDF. They take orders and process them, print the book on demand, and send it out. They take a fixed cost (based on number of pages, binding, etc.) and you set the margin added to that, which goes to you. You get an ISBN, which gets the book into Books in Print, and they have arrangements for listing the book with Amazon.com and some other distributors. It looks attractive if you don't need the editing or marketing that a regular publisher provides.
I've used lulu for some nonfiction books, and I've been fairly happy with them, apart from some painful issues early on until I learned how to work around some of their issues. However, I wrote those books to scratch my own itch, whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff. Self-publishing is not a good way to make any significant amount of money. The big problem is lack of promotion. It's also virtually impossible to get a self-published book into a books-and-mortar store. (Possible exceptions would be, e.g., getting a bookstore in Pacific Grove, CA, to carry a self-published book on the history of Pacific Grove.)
Another thing to realize about lulu is that they have different levels of service, some of which cost the author and others that don't. The general rule in thr world of publishing is that money is supposed to flow toward the author, not the other way around; anything else is most likely a scam, and even if it's not a scam, it's almost certainly not a good idea. I use lulu's free level of service, and it works for me -- but that means I don't get an ISBN from them, or any of theire other services (which I suspect are basically snake oil).
If all you want is to get an ISBN for a book and get it in Books in Print, you can just do that directly by dealing with Bowker. You don't need lulu for that. One thing to consider about getting an ISBN for a self-published book is that you're supposed to have a different ISBN for every edition of the book. I don't know whether lulu will do that for you or not.
Okay, I know the first rule of slashdot is that you don't read TFA. But I did, and they messed up. On p. 135 they describe a process that occurs at rate alpha where normal humans decapitate or destroy the brains of zombies. This reduces the population Z of zombies, and increases the population R of "removed" individuals. But they also have a process that occurs at rate zeta, where "removed" individuals are resurrected and become zombies. No way! Once you decapitate the zombie or destroy its brain, it can't be resurrected! R should just be the group that's dead with an intact brain, and then the R'=...+alpha SZ... term shouldn't be there. There should only be a -alpha SZ term in the Z' equation.
I assume all the students have computers to read the textbooks? I guess a laptop for each student is cheaper than the cumulative cost of the textbooks depending on how long they keep the same textbook around
This was a huge topic of discussion at the symposium where the results were announced. I've blogged about it here, but I'll quote the relevant part of what I wrote:
"Nobody seemed sure about the implications of the settlement in the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students. Will poor students be locked out because they don't have computers? Schwarzenegger's proposed solution is to print out books as needed, but Murugan Pal from CK-12 pointed out that current state law allows a school to use textbook funds to pay $80 for a book from a commercial publisher, but forbids it to pay $10 to print out a copy of a free book at Kinko's."
There was a heavy presence from the computer hardware industry, too. They love the idea of walking into a California public school and selling one netbook per student.
But I hope we don't resort to wiki textbooks which anyone can edit.
This was discussed quite a bit at the symposium this week where the results of the California initiative were released. Quite a few of the books come from wikis (e.g., ck-12.org), but none of these wikis allow editing by just anyone who comes along. You have to convince them you're an expert before they'll give you an account.
According to TFA this study was done for high school textbooks only, perhaps they will go on to supply books to other grade levels but penetrating the cash cow that is university publishing is no easy task.
It doesn't require government action at the college level, because college instructors make their own textbook decisions. There are already hundreds of high-quality free and open-source college textbooks -- see my sig. The biggest issue is that a lot of instructors just don't know these books exist, because there aren't sales people knocking on the doors of their offices trying to sell them.
You say that now, but wait for the Open Intelligent Design course materials come out.
It's actually kind of funny, but my experience as the author of some free physics textbooks as been almost exactly the opposite of the situation you have in mind. My books are written for use at the college level, but I have quite a few high school users as well, and the vast majority of these high schools are religious high schools, mostly Catholic schools. The reason is simply that state education bureaucracies make it impossible in most cases for public schools to adopt open-source books, so the ones who can adopt them are mostly private schools, and a lot of private schools are religious. I have one book that's written for the type of course that biology majors usually take, and I've taken tons of opportunities to work in mentions of evolution, e.g., in the chapter that discusses refraction I start off with the evolution of the eye. Doesn't seem to have bothered thes folks a bit. Of course the Catholic Church doesn't have any issues with evolution anyway.
There have been plenty of fairly successful attempts, on the other hand, to get ID into schools through the traditional setup of public school bureaucracies, state legislatures, and textbook publishers. A lot of publishers water down the discussion of evolution in their K-12 texts in an effort to make them more salable in places like Texas.
Instructor materials and supplements were not included. So, this is basically a setup/joke.
Your statement is literally true, but very misleading. The state didn't ask anyone to submit ancillary materials, so even if the ancillary materials exist, you're not going to see them listed on the clrn.org site. As a specific example, I submitted my physics textbook, and my ancillary materials are available here. They include a test bank, solutions to homework problems, and an instructor's manual.
This includes, support, Web sites for both students and instructors, assessment software, assessment preparation material, copious student assignments and solutions, automatic grading software, prepared lecture material, etc.
My book includes a web site, assessment software, lots of homework problems and solutions, and automatic grading software.
But, even in something like a math course, open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue. That is, students do the assignments or tests and then the solutions are passed on to the next year's students. Publishers do quite a bit of work to change problems. Do not underestimate the amount of work and editing/QA involved in such an effort.
In my own field, physics, your description is completely inaccurate in critical ways. Big commercial books like Halliday and Resnick come out in new editions every few years. The new editions typically have zero changes to the presentation of the material, and very few new homework problems. What they actually tend to do is renumber the homework problems so that it becomes a huge hassle to use the old edition side by side with the new one. This is simply to kill off the market for used books.
I'd also be interested in seeing your evidence for your statement that 'open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue.' Open textbooks are actually easier to change, because they're typically not produced and distributed via conventional printing. They're either distributed purely via the web or, in some cases, via print on demand services like lulu. In fact, one of the governor's big talking points in favor of free and open-source textbooks has been that they can be updated more rapidly, unlike antiquated paper books from traditional publishers. In fact, one of the issues discussed extensively at the symposium this week was the fear that open-source textbooks would change too quickly. The K-12 bureacracy is heavily oriented toward top-down control over textbook selection, and they actually want to impose a two-year freeze on digital texts once they're approved, so that the books won't change after having been blessed as conforming to state standards.
And they want it all automatically graded electronically. This can't be delivered by open textbooks.
Huh? This "can't" be delivered by open textbooks? This is particularly off base. In fact, automatic electronic grading was pioneered by open-source folks at universities. One of the first systems used for math and physics was LON-CAPA, which is open-source software that was first developed about 20 years ago at MSU, and is still being actively developed and supported. Here is a list of some open-source software for this type of thing. What's changed within the last few years is that the publishers have started offering these things as services that students have to pay for, and promoting them heavily in publications like The Physics Teacher. So if all you've been exposed to is sales reps' pitches, I can see how you'd be under the impression that it only exists in proprietary form, but that's completely inaccurate.
I was at the symposium where the results were announced, and I wrote up some notes about it here. It was actually a pretty interesting panel discussion, with open-source types side by side on the platform along with reps from the publishing industry and the computer hardware industry (which is drooling over the opportunity this represents of selling more computers to schools so they can access electronic books).
The slashdot summary is not particularly accurate.
It wasn't a competition. Anyone could submit a book, and it wasn't like one had to lose so another could win. The state simply checked submissions to see whether they covered the topics listed in the standard.
"Many traditional publishers submitted textbooks..." I don't think this is true. I believe that only Pearson submitted anything.
What Pearson submitted was just a consumable biology workbook, so it's not especially surprising that it wasn't judged as developing all the topics on the list.
The story isn't really that the traditional publishers tried and failed, it's that they essentially sat this one out. Pearson did a half-assed token submission, and the other publisher that had a rep at the symposium, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, didn't submit anything at all. They're clearly highly allergic to the "free" part of "Free Digital Textbook Initiative."
It would be great if companies with sloppy security practices would be punished severely, go out of business, have all their executives waterboarded and sent to Guantanamo, etc. But the next best thing is if I, as an individual, have a meaningful opportunity for choice. I switched from Ameritrade to Scottrade because I, like many other people, was getting pump-and-dump spam sent to the email address that I used only with Ameritrade. (For years they claimed it was dictionary attacks, even though I and many others explained to them why that wasn't a plausible explanation of the data. They finally admitted to a security breach after years of such stonewalling.) Another good example is that I use Linux rather than Windows. You can also go to optoutprescreen.com and opt out of unsolicited credit card offers, and that's actually a win-win; you're happy because of the better security, and they're happy because they keep you as a customer and don't get the expense of sending you offers that you're not going to read. And of course, you can take the opportunity to let companies know why you're making these choices. E.g., when I closed my Ameritrade account, I told them why.
No, I'm not under the illusion that Ameritrade, Microsoft, or Mastercard are shaking in their boots. These companies all basically made economic decisions that some other benefit was more important to them than taking their customers' security seriously. But that doesn't change the fact that my choices improved my own security.
I hate to say it, because I'm a linux fanboy, but Linux on netbooks has more or less failed. Manufacturers like Asus dropped the ball by shipping too many Linux machines with screwed up configurations (and also with the crappiest Linux distros available). MS also recognized the threat and entered the ring fighting. The result is that most retailers are pushing netbooks with Windows, and most people buying netbooks are buying them with Windows. Maybe this will change if ARM-based netbooks really take off, but I suspect it will be the same story all over again.
I RTFA and its not about switching word processors. Its about moving beyond people editing files one at a time and passing them around - in printed or email form. Basically, the author just discovered the "Magical World of Wiki" and has gotten his office to adopt a wiki as their documentation system.
Right, "Word" should never have even been in the title. The whole article would have made more sense with s/Word/a word processor/g.
Wikis are great for the kind collaborative editing he's talking about, but I suspect that his ability to get his office to adopt a wiki was influenced strongly by the fact that they're techies. I had a similar situation at the school where I teach physics. We have a stockroom full of apparatus, and a stockroom clerk who keeps track of it all. She put it in an Excel spreadsheet, and we then had pretty much all the hassles that he described in the article -- the awkwardness of trying to use MS Office for group editing of documents, when that's not what MS Office was fundamentally designed for. The spreadsheet ended up being incomplete, inaccurate, and useless. I set up a wiki, and converted all the data into wiki format, but had zero luck getting the lab tech or any of the faculty to actually start using the wiki. I think it was a combination of the fact that it was unfamiliar technology with the fact that it came off like I was trying to make extra work for other people.
It would also have been interesting to hear whether they considered Google Docs. Since they're techies, the disadvantages of Google Docs (privacy, lock-in, vulnerability to Google's whims, proprietary software) probably outweighed the disadvantages of a wiki (needing to set up your own wiki server and maintain the wiki on an ongoing basis). But for non-techies, I suspect the idea of setting up a wiki on a server would have been a no-go.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno about Canada or Switzerland, but in the US, the right of publicity in most states is relatively weak: http://www.publaw.com/rightpriv.html . Asking for permission might be a good idea, but in the US, it seems pretty clear to me (IANAL) that what google is doing isn't violating the right of publicity.
Seems unreasonable to me. You're out in public. People can see you.
Just because a particular action can affect the value of your property, that doesn't mean that you have a legal right not to have that action taken.
Huh? If someone's stalking you, and they know your address, you think they won't be able to get a photo of your house?
I actually find your overly expansive view of property rights a lot scarier than anything google is doing.
IMO the really creepy stuff happens when lots of data about a particular person gets aggregated and made conveniently available. For instance, there are web sites like snitch.name that web-scrape social networking sites. Google isn't aggregating data about individuals here, and in fact they're trying pretty hard to avoid even including recognizable faces in the photos. Another creepy thing is when employers won't give Joe a job because Joe's credit rating is bad -- and then Joe can never pay off his debts, because he can't get a job. Again, it isn't google doing this.
Re energy, they come in with an informal concept of energy (food calories, etc.), and my experience is that many of their conceptual errors with force occur because they subconsciously associate that informal energy concept with the symbol F.
I see -- thanks for the info about lightning source. I didn't know they did retail order fulfillment.
I think we're starting to see a blurring of the lines between publishers and printers. Lulu, for example, does many of the things traditionally associated with the publisher (production, storage, distribution, retail sales, disbursing royalties to the author, a tiny bit of promotion), but doesn't do a lot of the other things a publisher would traditionally do (editorial, art, serious promotion).
Hi -- I'm the author of the book. Of course, de gustibus non est disputandum, but re "half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion)," those topics are in volume 2. It's a 6-book series.
Evidence, please? I'm a college professor, and I've never been offered a kickback from a publisher.
Your examples of Baen and Tor are a little off the mark, since those are fiction publishing houses. Generally fiction publishers are never interested in reading submissions that have already been published. (Yes, there are tons of exceptions, but that's the general rule.) In academia, it's quite common for authors to release their textbooks for free online, and then get a contract with a publisher. Fifty years ago, the professor would run off copies of his book on purple mimeograph paper and test drive it with his students, debug it, and only then get it published; putting the book online for free is the modern (and ethical) way to do the same thing. I have never, ever heard of a textbook publisher having an issue with this. What does tend to happen a lot is that once the publisher is bringing out the book in print, they demand that the author take down the free download. If you look though the catalog of free books in my sig, there are probably several hundred books that used to be free, but are now marked as broken links; almost always, the situation is the one I've just described. There are publishers who are more open-minded. One example that springs to mind is that Benjamin Cummings published Sean Carroll's general relativity book, but an earlier form of the book is still available free online (without, e.g., the improved versions of the figures that the publisher produced for their edition). The basic problem is that textbook prices are wildly inflated, and resulting extremely lucrative (and exploitative) setup is not sustainable unless the publisher has a perfect iron grip over the book.
Slightly different take here.
IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.
Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments...
Lots of incorrect statements here.
Open-source is not the same thing as multi-author. My own physics textbooks are open-source, but I'm the only author. Open-source, in the context of a textbook, simply means it's under an appropriate copyleft license (e.g., CC-BY-SA), and it's in an open, editable format (e.g., latex). It does not mean that anyone who wants to can alter the contents of my books.
Totally wrong. This is exactly what ck12 and curriki are doing. Yes, their books have been adopted by schools. You seem to be imagining that all wikis are publicly editable. Just because something is a wiki, that doesn't mean that it's editable by anyone. For instance, the books on ck12 can't be edited unless you ask for an account and convince them you know enough to make a positive contribution. Also, "Wikipedia doesn't fly in academia" is a correct statement if you're talking about citing references. An equally true statement is "textbooks don't fly in academia" -- that is, nobody cites a textbook as a reference.
For a catalog of free and/or open-source books, see my sig. I've written some free physics textbooks, and have been fairly successful getting them adopted at colleges and high schools (scroll down on that page for a list of adoptions).
In my experience, college profs and high school teachers tend to be pretty open-minded about adopting free books. I haven't seen much evidence of any stigma associated with the fact that they're not published by a big publishing house. High school teachers at public high schools generally don't get the freedom to choose a book that hasn't been approved by the state bureaucracy, but teachers at Catholic schools and charter schools do. Most of my high school adoptions have been from private religious schools.
Promoting a self-published book is always difficult. For me it's been mostly word of mouth, but I've also paid for ads in The Physics Teacher now and then.
I started out by doing the order fulfillment myself. That was nuts. After doing that for years, I was extremely happy to have it done by lulu -- no fuss, no muss. Pros and cons of lulu:
It sounds like you're planning on selling to colleges. Don't underestimate the insane cheapness of impoverished college students. If your book costs significantly more in print than it would cost them to download it and print it out at Kinko's, they'll download it and print it. No, it's not logical to save thirty-seven cents by printing the book out instead of buying a nice, bound copy. Yes, they'll do it anyway. For this reason, do not expect to make any money on this project. Do it if it makes you happy. Do it if it scratches your itch. The good thing about lulu is that if you use their free option, you're guaranteed not to *lose* any money.
This is extremely offensive. Not only do you have your facts wrong, but you throw in some name-calling as well. Here is my previous comment. Here is a reply from Anonymous Coward, asking me to send a copy of the email to an oreilly address. Here is my reply to that comment, in which I explained that I no longer had the email. (I generally delete spam as soon as I receive it.) Are you ready to admit that you have your facts wrong.
My email address is bcrowell at fullcoll dot edu. Removing me from your list won't be necessary, since I already have O'Reilly blocked in my spam filter. What I would like is an apology for your entirely groundless and offensive personal attacks.
I'm chicken to run software on my machine that's from a random unknown person, and totally closed source.
Too bad it appears to be for windows only.
This isn't quite accurate. First off, you're supposed to have a new ISBN for every edition. A book is not supposed to have a single ISBN associated with it forever, so portability is not such a big issue. Just get a new ISBN. I could be wrong, but I also don't think your example of bringing in your own ISBN to lulu works. Lulu wants to sell you an ISBN as part of one of their packages. And if you move to a conventional publisher, they're going to certainly do enough changes to the book (even if it's just the cover and binding) to require generating a new ISBN for a new edition.
There are really three options for a self-published book, each of which has its own pros and cons:
I have some No Starch books on my shelf that really could have used better editing.
I used to have warm, fuzzy feelings about O'Reilly and my shelf full of O'Reilly books. That was before they started spamming me. I'm a college professor, and they sent me spam trying to get me to adopt one of their physics books for my courses. This was at a .edu email address that I had never given to them -- in fact, I had no preexisting business relationship with O'Reilly at all, except for buying their books on amazon and in bricks-and-mortar bookstores (and not with that email address, either).
I don't do business with spammers.
I've used lulu for some nonfiction books, and I've been fairly happy with them, apart from some painful issues early on until I learned how to work around some of their issues. However, I wrote those books to scratch my own itch, whereas I'm guessing the OP wants to write his to, like, you know, pay the rent and stuff. Self-publishing is not a good way to make any significant amount of money. The big problem is lack of promotion. It's also virtually impossible to get a self-published book into a books-and-mortar store. (Possible exceptions would be, e.g., getting a bookstore in Pacific Grove, CA, to carry a self-published book on the history of Pacific Grove.)
Another thing to realize about lulu is that they have different levels of service, some of which cost the author and others that don't. The general rule in thr world of publishing is that money is supposed to flow toward the author, not the other way around; anything else is most likely a scam, and even if it's not a scam, it's almost certainly not a good idea. I use lulu's free level of service, and it works for me -- but that means I don't get an ISBN from them, or any of theire other services (which I suspect are basically snake oil).
If all you want is to get an ISBN for a book and get it in Books in Print, you can just do that directly by dealing with Bowker. You don't need lulu for that. One thing to consider about getting an ISBN for a self-published book is that you're supposed to have a different ISBN for every edition of the book. I don't know whether lulu will do that for you or not.
Okay, I know the first rule of slashdot is that you don't read TFA. But I did, and they messed up. On p. 135 they describe a process that occurs at rate alpha where normal humans decapitate or destroy the brains of zombies. This reduces the population Z of zombies, and increases the population R of "removed" individuals. But they also have a process that occurs at rate zeta, where "removed" individuals are resurrected and become zombies. No way! Once you decapitate the zombie or destroy its brain, it can't be resurrected! R should just be the group that's dead with an intact brain, and then the R'=...+alpha SZ ... term shouldn't be there. There should only be a -alpha SZ term in the Z' equation.
This was a huge topic of discussion at the symposium where the results were announced. I've blogged about it here, but I'll quote the relevant part of what I wrote: "Nobody seemed sure about the implications of the settlement in the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students. Will poor students be locked out because they don't have computers? Schwarzenegger's proposed solution is to print out books as needed, but Murugan Pal from CK-12 pointed out that current state law allows a school to use textbook funds to pay $80 for a book from a commercial publisher, but forbids it to pay $10 to print out a copy of a free book at Kinko's."
There was a heavy presence from the computer hardware industry, too. They love the idea of walking into a California public school and selling one netbook per student.
This was discussed quite a bit at the symposium this week where the results of the California initiative were released. Quite a few of the books come from wikis (e.g., ck-12.org), but none of these wikis allow editing by just anyone who comes along. You have to convince them you're an expert before they'll give you an account.
It doesn't require government action at the college level, because college instructors make their own textbook decisions. There are already hundreds of high-quality free and open-source college textbooks -- see my sig. The biggest issue is that a lot of instructors just don't know these books exist, because there aren't sales people knocking on the doors of their offices trying to sell them.
It's actually kind of funny, but my experience as the author of some free physics textbooks as been almost exactly the opposite of the situation you have in mind. My books are written for use at the college level, but I have quite a few high school users as well, and the vast majority of these high schools are religious high schools, mostly Catholic schools. The reason is simply that state education bureaucracies make it impossible in most cases for public schools to adopt open-source books, so the ones who can adopt them are mostly private schools, and a lot of private schools are religious. I have one book that's written for the type of course that biology majors usually take, and I've taken tons of opportunities to work in mentions of evolution, e.g., in the chapter that discusses refraction I start off with the evolution of the eye. Doesn't seem to have bothered thes folks a bit. Of course the Catholic Church doesn't have any issues with evolution anyway.
There have been plenty of fairly successful attempts, on the other hand, to get ID into schools through the traditional setup of public school bureaucracies, state legislatures, and textbook publishers. A lot of publishers water down the discussion of evolution in their K-12 texts in an effort to make them more salable in places like Texas.
Your statement is literally true, but very misleading. The state didn't ask anyone to submit ancillary materials, so even if the ancillary materials exist, you're not going to see them listed on the clrn.org site. As a specific example, I submitted my physics textbook, and my ancillary materials are available here. They include a test bank, solutions to homework problems, and an instructor's manual.
My book includes a web site, assessment software, lots of homework problems and solutions, and automatic grading software.
In my own field, physics, your description is completely inaccurate in critical ways. Big commercial books like Halliday and Resnick come out in new editions every few years. The new editions typically have zero changes to the presentation of the material, and very few new homework problems. What they actually tend to do is renumber the homework problems so that it becomes a huge hassle to use the old edition side by side with the new one. This is simply to kill off the market for used books.
I'd also be interested in seeing your evidence for your statement that 'open textbooks run into the "staleness" issue.' Open textbooks are actually easier to change, because they're typically not produced and distributed via conventional printing. They're either distributed purely via the web or, in some cases, via print on demand services like lulu. In fact, one of the governor's big talking points in favor of free and open-source textbooks has been that they can be updated more rapidly, unlike antiquated paper books from traditional publishers. In fact, one of the issues discussed extensively at the symposium this week was the fear that open-source textbooks would change too quickly. The K-12 bureacracy is heavily oriented toward top-down control over textbook selection, and they actually want to impose a two-year freeze on digital texts once they're approved, so that the books won't change after having been blessed as conforming to state standards.
Huh? This "can't" be delivered by open textbooks? This is particularly off base. In fact, automatic electronic grading was pioneered by open-source folks at universities. One of the first systems used for math and physics was LON-CAPA, which is open-source software that was first developed about 20 years ago at MSU, and is still being actively developed and supported. Here is a list of some open-source software for this type of thing. What's changed within the last few years is that the publishers have started offering these things as services that students have to pay for, and promoting them heavily in publications like The Physics Teacher. So if all you've been exposed to is sales reps' pitches, I can see how you'd be under the impression that it only exists in proprietary form, but that's completely inaccurate.
I was at the symposium where the results were announced, and I wrote up some notes about it here. It was actually a pretty interesting panel discussion, with open-source types side by side on the platform along with reps from the publishing industry and the computer hardware industry (which is drooling over the opportunity this represents of selling more computers to schools so they can access electronic books).
The slashdot summary is not particularly accurate.
What Pearson submitted was just a consumable biology workbook, so it's not especially surprising that it wasn't judged as developing all the topics on the list.
The story isn't really that the traditional publishers tried and failed, it's that they essentially sat this one out. Pearson did a half-assed token submission, and the other publisher that had a rep at the symposium, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, didn't submit anything at all. They're clearly highly allergic to the "free" part of "Free Digital Textbook Initiative."
It would be great if companies with sloppy security practices would be punished severely, go out of business, have all their executives waterboarded and sent to Guantanamo, etc. But the next best thing is if I, as an individual, have a meaningful opportunity for choice. I switched from Ameritrade to Scottrade because I, like many other people, was getting pump-and-dump spam sent to the email address that I used only with Ameritrade. (For years they claimed it was dictionary attacks, even though I and many others explained to them why that wasn't a plausible explanation of the data. They finally admitted to a security breach after years of such stonewalling.) Another good example is that I use Linux rather than Windows. You can also go to optoutprescreen.com and opt out of unsolicited credit card offers, and that's actually a win-win; you're happy because of the better security, and they're happy because they keep you as a customer and don't get the expense of sending you offers that you're not going to read. And of course, you can take the opportunity to let companies know why you're making these choices. E.g., when I closed my Ameritrade account, I told them why.
No, I'm not under the illusion that Ameritrade, Microsoft, or Mastercard are shaking in their boots. These companies all basically made economic decisions that some other benefit was more important to them than taking their customers' security seriously. But that doesn't change the fact that my choices improved my own security.
I hate to say it, because I'm a linux fanboy, but Linux on netbooks has more or less failed. Manufacturers like Asus dropped the ball by shipping too many Linux machines with screwed up configurations (and also with the crappiest Linux distros available). MS also recognized the threat and entered the ring fighting. The result is that most retailers are pushing netbooks with Windows, and most people buying netbooks are buying them with Windows. Maybe this will change if ARM-based netbooks really take off, but I suspect it will be the same story all over again.
Right, "Word" should never have even been in the title. The whole article would have made more sense with s/Word/a word processor/g.
Wikis are great for the kind collaborative editing he's talking about, but I suspect that his ability to get his office to adopt a wiki was influenced strongly by the fact that they're techies. I had a similar situation at the school where I teach physics. We have a stockroom full of apparatus, and a stockroom clerk who keeps track of it all. She put it in an Excel spreadsheet, and we then had pretty much all the hassles that he described in the article -- the awkwardness of trying to use MS Office for group editing of documents, when that's not what MS Office was fundamentally designed for. The spreadsheet ended up being incomplete, inaccurate, and useless. I set up a wiki, and converted all the data into wiki format, but had zero luck getting the lab tech or any of the faculty to actually start using the wiki. I think it was a combination of the fact that it was unfamiliar technology with the fact that it came off like I was trying to make extra work for other people.
It would also have been interesting to hear whether they considered Google Docs. Since they're techies, the disadvantages of Google Docs (privacy, lock-in, vulnerability to Google's whims, proprietary software) probably outweighed the disadvantages of a wiki (needing to set up your own wiki server and maintain the wiki on an ongoing basis). But for non-techies, I suspect the idea of setting up a wiki on a server would have been a no-go.