Rant of the Week

Why Not Open Source Books?

 

I do not know what to do with my books.  I don't even know how many I have.  Probably over a thousand.  They sit on their prefab bookshelves, two layers deep, along my basement wall.  They look fine.  They testify to my learning and erudition.  They show that I am not one of the thoughtless mob who spend hours and hours watching television.

Books have become very, very expensive.  I know of a student at the University of Waterloo who recently spent over $900 for her course books.  Is there some kind of scam going on with the universities and book publishers?  Students are always told they need the latest, newest, revised edition.  No effort is made to make new editions compatible with old editions, by retaining a consistent paging sequence, or by publishing addendums, or online updates. 

How on earth can a laptop computer cost less than your course books?  The computer requires thousands of manufactured parts from all over the globe, carefully assembled and tested, and shipped thousands of miles.  Yet you can buy a new laptop for $500 or $600 nowadays.  You can buy a lawnmower for $240.  You can't buy five books for less than that?

I think we need a movement.  We need a group of intellectual hackers to devise an alternative to the established publishers, to write new text books and publish them on electronic readers like the Kindle.  We need students to organize themselves and demand that professors adopt these new electronic books for their courses.

Their objection, of course, will be that they only want this particular book, a printed, published one, for the course.  Only this book will do.  Just as, in the computer world, first it was "only IBM will do" and then "only Microsoft will do".  Finally today, more and more users, including governments and corporations have discovered Linux.

What would happen if Universities supported this movement and began to require that all books be supplied in digital format and that they cost less than $20 each?  Well, what would happen if they told the publishers they were no longer going to buy their inefficient, over-priced, tree-slaying compendiums?  The publishers would have no choice.  First, they would claim that they would be driven out of business.  Then some smaller, more nimble publishers would start filling the gap.  Then the big companies would buy them out and double their prices.

If there are enough hackers out there to support Linux-- very efficiently, I might add-- then there must be enough intellectuals, scientists, and others who would support a new "open source" text book system.  In fact, isn't Wikipedia a demonstration of this exact idea? 

 

Copyright © 2009  Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.

All contents copyright 2005 Bill Van Dyk