Open Source Knowledge
The lack of posts is Jackson's fault.
The overly inactive open-source revolutionary in me spoke the words 'if you ever write a textbook, please make it free' to two different professors this week. Should books be free like Linux is free? Yes, they should. Of course, printing costs are a reasonable thing to charge for and the author's time also has monetary value (which open-source software authors are usually willing to forfeit as probably would some academics). As it is there exist plenty free 'text books' online. Don't believe me? Check this out. Online books are nice, but if you are going to be doing a fair amount of reading it is actually nice to have a reasonable quality hard copy. So, my rough sketch of a solution is to create a 'publishing' company that operates as follows.
Books are made available online for free or for minimal cost (to break even in terms of hosting). People can then order printed copies of the books for an additional cost to cover printing expenses. This is all organized through a web-site... duh, it is me coming up with it, right?
This has its logistical fallacies: it is probably a lot cheaper to print several thousand copies of a book than printing them 'on demand'. But with reasonable popularity measures and printing practices the logistic problems could perhaps be made into manageable ones.
EDIT: Doing about 10 minutes worth of research into publishing costs revealed to me that one can expect to get a paperback quality book published for $5-20 per copy depending on the number of copies. This definitely makes the idea plausible.
Now we can take this to a whole new level. Imagine web-book 2.0. Users can register and have reviews, rankings and recommendations for books. Perhaps one can allow users to upload materials and have the system keep track of what items are related in one way or another. As the number of books and users grow the costs would probably do so as well, but I think that a non-for-profit spirit plus some creativity in ways to earn revenue could make ends meet. For instance, printed books could be sold at a price slightly higher than cost as to cover the other expenses of the site. Or perhaps users could pay a yearly membership fee.
Now a bit of due credit. Zack had a variation of this idea several years ago and it has been in the back of my head since then.
The main problem with all this is that for whatever reason the books that are available for free online are rarely as good as the overpriced published ones. I can think of several possible reasons why this is so, but whatever. In any event, my generation might have just gotten fed up enough with new editions that merely shuffle problems around and price tags over $100 to start producing reasonably good content that can be made available in a non-profit manner. I say it is the duty of our generation to start by writing a better e&m book.
Viva la Linux revolucion!
The overly inactive open-source revolutionary in me spoke the words 'if you ever write a textbook, please make it free' to two different professors this week. Should books be free like Linux is free? Yes, they should. Of course, printing costs are a reasonable thing to charge for and the author's time also has monetary value (which open-source software authors are usually willing to forfeit as probably would some academics). As it is there exist plenty free 'text books' online. Don't believe me? Check this out. Online books are nice, but if you are going to be doing a fair amount of reading it is actually nice to have a reasonable quality hard copy. So, my rough sketch of a solution is to create a 'publishing' company that operates as follows.
Books are made available online for free or for minimal cost (to break even in terms of hosting). People can then order printed copies of the books for an additional cost to cover printing expenses. This is all organized through a web-site... duh, it is me coming up with it, right?
This has its logistical fallacies: it is probably a lot cheaper to print several thousand copies of a book than printing them 'on demand'. But with reasonable popularity measures and printing practices the logistic problems could perhaps be made into manageable ones.
EDIT: Doing about 10 minutes worth of research into publishing costs revealed to me that one can expect to get a paperback quality book published for $5-20 per copy depending on the number of copies. This definitely makes the idea plausible.
Now we can take this to a whole new level. Imagine web-book 2.0. Users can register and have reviews, rankings and recommendations for books. Perhaps one can allow users to upload materials and have the system keep track of what items are related in one way or another. As the number of books and users grow the costs would probably do so as well, but I think that a non-for-profit spirit plus some creativity in ways to earn revenue could make ends meet. For instance, printed books could be sold at a price slightly higher than cost as to cover the other expenses of the site. Or perhaps users could pay a yearly membership fee.
Now a bit of due credit. Zack had a variation of this idea several years ago and it has been in the back of my head since then.
The main problem with all this is that for whatever reason the books that are available for free online are rarely as good as the overpriced published ones. I can think of several possible reasons why this is so, but whatever. In any event, my generation might have just gotten fed up enough with new editions that merely shuffle problems around and price tags over $100 to start producing reasonably good content that can be made available in a non-profit manner. I say it is the duty of our generation to start by writing a better e&m book.
Viva la Linux revolucion!
posted by rz at 6:39 PM
1 Comments:
que viva =)
my effin psy book was 75 bucks, and it was effin paperback..me was pissed.
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