Textbooks are a large and rapidly growing expense for millions of college students. This expense is completely unnecessary – it results entirely from the fact that the United States relies on copyright monopolies to finance the production of textbooks. It is easy to design alternative systems for financing textbook production, which take full advantage of the possibilities created by the Internet and digital technology. Such alternatives could make textbooks very cheap or even free for students who are satisfied reading material on the web. Having college texts in the public domain will also give professors much more freedom in selecting material, since they would be able to customize their classes, assigning chapters from a number of different texts. It would take a very small commitment of public funds (e.g. 0.01 percent of the federal budget) to largely replace the revenue generated for textbook production through the copyright system. A system of publicly financed
textbook production could co-exist alongside the system of copyright monopolies, allowing for a market test of the relative efficiency of the two systems. Such an alternative system could offer large savings to students, more flexibility to professors, and efficiency gains to the economy as a whole.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/10/2005 06:03:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
