Open-Textbooks

Open Education News points to a Scientific American article covering the California Learning Resource Network’s reviews of 16 open science and math textbooks for coverage of CA state standards. These reviews support schools making adoption decisions about whether or not open textbooks are of sufficient breadth and quality to be formally adopted in place of commercial textbooks. Brendan Borrell, the SA article’s author, points out that “the front-runners [in the CLRN reviews] were typically written by just one or several authors, and the one major organization that has fully embraced a Wiki approach failed to impress CLRN reviewers.” This could have been, and in fact was, predicted long before. ...

Responding to some comments on yesterday’s post about my ideal open textbook legislation: Ben Werdmuller asked, “Is there any reason for not including the whole range of permissive CC licensing, including the Public Domain one?” Yes indeed! For one, I think it is crucial that the licenses allowed all be remix-compatible with one another. That means no ND license (no remix is allowed at all) and only one SA license (otherwise, no remixing is possible across works). BY and CC Zero (in effect a public domain license) are remix compatible with everything, as would be a public domain dedication (let’s please remember that licenses only apply to copyrighted material - since materials in the public domain are not copyrighted they can’t have a license!). Using NC is likely important to incentivize publisher participation, which I address below. ...

Stephen says, “My argument is that if you require a letter of suipport from publishers, then publishers will immediately turn this into a cartel, which would mean that prices would not drop at all. You do not address this line of reasoning at all.” I’ll happily address it here, but Stephen’s comment also ignores my main point. First, let me deal with the suggestion that price will not drop at all. A content-complete openly licensed version of the book online is all the price control that is needed. The existence of this version controls price by providing an alternate mechanism for accessing the content. If you really want a printed version, and you can purchase one for $25, you’ll purchase one. If you really want a printed version, but you can only buy one for $75, you’ll just print out all the pages at Kinko’s and put them in a three-ring binder. More than one person will create and distribute (legally) a PDF that makes printing for your three ring binder really easy, and no one will purchase the $75 version from the publisher. The same is true for an audio version, etc. So the existence of the free version provides price control all by itself. If the publisher wants to sell books, those books have to satisfy Wiley’s magic formula of open book sales: ...

There’s a lot of talk about open textbook legislation going around right now. I recently reported on HR 1464, which was a great first start, but on reflection could be improved significantly. I’ve had some opportunities to think about what the “perfect” open textbook bill would look like, so I thought I’d share MNSHO. The legislation would create competitive funding opportunities to create open textbooks in any content area. These would be multi-stage grants (like the SBIR program), with additional funding tied to the successful completion of initial project goals. ...

Flat World Knowledge, the start-up company I am involved with, is officially out in the open now. We were featured on NPR’s Marketplace this evening. Program audio is also available. Flat World Knowledge is a company dedicated to open textbooks. The videos on the website tell the story really well. I look forward to your feedback on what we’re doing! UPDATE: Also see the Professors Gone Paperless article at Inside Higher Ed, and 1,000 Professors Sign Statement for Affordable Textbooks at Make Textbooks Affordable.