Declan Butler, The textbook of the future, Nature, April 1, 2009. Accessible only to subscribers. Excerpt:
...A more radical idea is to offer textbooks for free, without rights restrictions. A range of free, open textbooks are already available for download at WikiBooks; the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources’ Open Text- Books Project; and Connexions, created in 1999 by electrical engineer Richard Baraniuk of Rice University in Houston Texas. These texts typically take the form of modules written by many expert authors....
Still, perhaps ‘free’ and ‘profitable’ need not be a contradiction in terms. One group of veteran textbook publishing executives is trying to put open textbooks on a solid commercial footing. In 2007 they created Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, New York, and in January 2009 rolled out the first of the 21 textbooks they have in development so far. The texts are written by some 40 domain experts who will be paid 20% of royalties. The company also plans to make its content available via Kindle and other e-readers. All its content will be free to reuse for non-commercial purposes under a creative commons licence.
Eric Frank, Flat World’s co-founder, says that the strategy is to attract greater use by giving the e-textbooks away — the initial targets are the high-volume texts for first-year students — and then look for profit from students’ purchase of print-on-demand versions at $29.95 for black and white, and $59.95 for colour. Students can copy and use the electronic content in any way they wish, says Frank. “Cheap prices are the most effective digital-rights management,” he says. “We want to avoid a digital-rights war with students.” The company also hopes to make money by licensing its content to commercial companies, such as distance-learning outfits and course-management software firms. By making its content free for reuse, Flat World Knowledge will allow lecturers to splice and dice its content. “More and more professors want to teach from ‘customized’ textbooks, which are aggregations of various materials, not just what a publisher has aggregated in a single book,” says [Kevin Hegarty, chief financial officer at the University of Texas at Austin]. He says that the UTA has made an electronic tool available for academics to aggregate any licensed library materials, including scientific journals, and ‘publish’ them to their students as their textbook materials. “I think that this is where textbooks are headed.” ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/02/2009 11:35:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
