Open Sourced Textbooks
A Recent NYT article reports on the recent trend of publishing university textbooks online instead of in the classic textbook format.
Cohen makes an interesting comparison of the textbook and pharmaceutical companies. They both provide a service that is essentially good and beneficial; they both have customers who are willing to sacrifice a lot of money for their services. All this while those who recommend their services do not notice price changes (doctors or professors).
Also notable is M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare, where students and teachers rewrite, edit, swap materials as long as the original author is credited. Obvious benefits are that professors get the sections of books that they really want to teach. Most professors are already doing this in the form of readers. But an online version of this would save a lot of paper, and raise a few legal issues.
With low barriers to publishing and distribution, professors win here because they can publish their work quicker, and distribute to a much wider audience than with traditional authorship models. Students win because they don’t have to bear the traditional publication costs.
Traditionally publishers have served as a standard of quality. What will happen if we eliminate the publisher’s role in textbook distribution? Perhaps one could imagine an academic world where other professors and possibly students rate, tag, and share course materials. Weinbergian delight? or do we already do this anyway?
Shawna Hein Said,
September 17, 2008 @ 10:21 am
Another thing to think about is the academic “cred” that professors receive for publishing their books with traditional publishers. Many professors I know would be happy to have their work online for free, but these same professors would not give up the traditional publishing of their work; they would rather have both. Probably not until we have some kind of academically recognized reputation system on the web will most professors agree to “publish” all their work online.