The wild and wiki world of textbook "publishing"

Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine
and scoffed: “Could you patent the sun?”

A Vice President at Big Pharma, Inc., immediately fired his
patent lawyer because she hadn't thought of it first.

Someone at the Guam Public School System went off on summer vacation and forgot school would begin all over again the next year. So, as next year rolled around, that someone (no one is accountable; names are never named) looked around and realized books hadn't been ordered. Ah well, just another emergency procurement.

That "oversight" as well as the multi-million dollar drain on resources might be mitigated if this trend develops:

Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, has put his introductory economics textbook online free.

Professor McAfee allows anyone to download a Word file or PDF of his book, while also taking advantage of the growing marketplace for print on demand.

In true economist fashion, he has allowed two companies, Lulu and Flat World Knowledge, to sell print versions of his textbook, with Lulu charging $11 and Flat World anywhere from $19.95 to $59.95. As he said on his Web site, he is keeping the multiple options to “further constrain their ability to engage in monopoly pricing.”

A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions, which was the brainchild of Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University, which has received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In addition to being a repository for textbooks covering a wide range of subjects and educational levels, its ethic is taken from the digital music world, he said — rip, burn and mash.

Unlike other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T., Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create a collection of material for students. “We are changing textbook publishing from a pipeline to an ecosystem,” he said.