Articles About Free Books
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No Paper, No Problem?Nearly all the books I surveyed are distributed purely digitally. Author Warren Siegel[8] says, "...I'm trying to discourage printing as much as possible... I see a lot of printing/publishing as more habit than convenience, with dead trees rotting in people's offices rather than in the forests." A few authors (e.g. Jim Hefferon[11]) distribute bound, printed books to their own students and encourage instructors at other schools who use the book to do the same, but this may have the effect of discouraging adoption of the book, since professors may not want the hassle. Students do want printed, bound books, and are willing to pay for them. I now have my own self-publishing business, but I originally distributed my book to students through print-to-order sales at Kinko's. Although Kinko's was expensive, roughly 90% of my students bought the books from Kinko's rather than downloading and printing them, which, after all, results in single-sided, unbound output. (I explained to them that I didn't get any royalties from Kinko's, so there was no personal motivation to buy the books rather than downloading them.) I have never had a student forgo dead-tree format completely and read the entire book from a computer monitor. For my own book[7] I'm now using free digital distribution side by side with commercial distribution of printed copies by wholesale. The issue here is that printing has high startup costs, and running a business is, frankly, a lot less fun than teaching and writing. The big investment required to self-publish a book is also in conflict with openness; giving up the monopoly on selling printed copies would make it even more scary to try to make back my money. Big booksellers such as Amazon.com and the bricks-and-mortar chains offer various options that let authors avoid the hassles and risks of setting up their own cottage industries, but their systems are not particularly attractive in my opinion. Amazon, for instance, offers a service in which they handle the retail ordering side of things while the author simply sends them wholesale shipments as needed. The problem is money. Amazon says they pay a "royalty" of 45%, which sounds generous, but is misleading. The author is responsible for production, so the 45% "royalty" is really an 82% retail markup, expressed as a percentage of the author's net. Considering how expensive short-run printing is, it's hard to imagine bringing a textbook to market at a reasonable price via this service. Other services handle both production and marketing, but are not able to do illustrated books. What Next?The solution to the difficulties of paper distribution is probably to limp along with the variety of approaches we've already been using, and wait for printing technology to solve the problem. The increasing digitization of the printing process and the emergence of efficient print-to-order systems is gradually making short-run print distribution cheaper and easier. I don't see any general solution on the horizon to the technical problems involved in true open-source books. However, some of the interesting projects that require an open source approach might be doable with HTML format, which can be used with CVS. Although HTML is not printer-friendly enough to be suitable for a complete book, it might be fine for some of the more limited, modular applications such as homework sets and application notes. History of Revisions2000 Sep 27 Added a reference to the FDL license in footnote 11. Added links to Ben Franklin's autobiography. 2000 Oct 1 Added more detail about evolution in K-12 biology textbooks. References[1] The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. ftp://sunsite.ualberta.ca/pub/Digital_Collections/Mirror/gutenberg/etext94/bfaut10.txt, http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/cat.cgi?&label=ID&ftpsite=ftp://sunsite.ualberta.ca/pub/Digital_Collections/Mirror/gutenberg/&alpha=153 [2] See online article about Zola and the Dreyfus affair: http://www.metropoleparis.com/1998/302/zola302.html. [3] James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, The New Press, New York. [4] Two good examples are Open Docs Publishing, (http://www.opendocspublishing.com) and Bruce Eckel (http://www.bruceeckel.com). [5] For more about the recent steep increases in textbook prices, see http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/bookprices.html. [6] All biology textbooks in Alabama must have a disclaimer pasted in the front with a text that begins, "This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact.". (http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/evolution980617.html) For an example of a high school textbook that incorporates a scientifically faulty religious view on evolution, see http://www.textbookleague.org/66livsys.htm. The treatment of evolution tends to be worse in the lower grades. One middle-school text (http://www.textbookleague.org/15adwes.htm) , for example, says that fossil evidence "suggests" dinosaurs existed and "suggests" that many species have become extinct, and devotes 130 pages to the species Homo sapiens without discussing our relationship to the other primates. [7] Ben Crowell, Light and Matter. http://www.lightandmatter.com/. [8] Warren Siegel, Fields. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9912205, http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/plan.html. [9] Biophysics Textbook On-Line. http://cbs.umn.edu/biophys/OLTB/Textbook.html [10] Frank Firk, Essential Physics. http://www.physicsforfree.com/essential.html [11] Jim Hefferon, Linear Algebra. http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html [12] The basic idea of open-source software is that the program is copyrighted by its authors, but it comes with a licensing agreement that preserves everyone's right to obtain the source code and modify it if they wish. ("Source code" refers to the instructions as entered by the programmer, as opposed to the binary form in which proprietary software is supplied, which is unintelligible to humans and virtually impossible to modify.) The press has sometimes not done a good job of distinguishing the open-source movement (I made it, now you can have it for free) from piracy (you made it, now I'll copy it whether you like it or not), although some open-source idealists are in sympathy with piracy, believing that all forms of information should be free. The classic exposition of the open-source software philosophy is Eric Raymond's essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/). The Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) argues for maximum freedom of information on moral grounds. Two well-known licenses for applying the open-source concept to other forms of expression besides computer code are the OPL (http://opencontent.org/) and the FDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html). [13] For more information about antibooks in dental schools, see http://slashdot.org/yro/00/08/28/1158221.shtml.
by Ben Crowell http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/sneaky.html At the height of the dot-com bubble, twenty-somethings with goatees were telling us that e-books were the wave of the future. Those e-books they had in mind were like proprietary software: they weren't free (-as-in-anything), they only worked on proprietary hardware, and they came with shrinkwrap licenses and digital rights management. They failed. The successful model that's sneaking under the radar is the copylefted book. Other articles in this intermittent series are this one from 2000, and this one from 2005. Two years ago, the idea of a free book --- a book whose author had intentionally made it free on the internet --- was largely unknown and untested.[1] Looming on the horizon instead, with every prospect of success, were the "anti-books:" electronic books encumbered with odious licensing terms and restrictive digital rights management technology.[2] You wouldn't be able to loan such a book to a friend, public libraries couldn't acquire it, and if you stopped paying your rental fee, it would expire and become unreadable! What the marketroids predicted didn't come true. The anti-book has been an abject failure. What seems to be succeeding instead is the copylefted book. My own online catalog, The Assayer,[3] currently lists 385 books that are free as in beer (i.e., can be read without paying money), of which 50 are free as in speech (come with copyleft licenses, and are guaranteed to stay free forever). My list is based only on random websurfing done by me and other users of my web site, so the true number of free books is certainly much greater than this. What's perhaps more significant than the quantity of books on the list is their quality: at least two of them[4],[5] seem to be the standard textbooks in their field today. Directory: uploads -> STU uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! STU -> Politics in the 1920’s Conservatism, Dominance of the Republican Party Conservatism Download 95.92 Kb. Share with your friends:
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