Problem with Open Textbooks: They are Free

Posted on | March 31, 2009 | 3 Comments

Yesterday morning, our fearless leader, Neeru Khosla, barged into a developer meeting, and said, “We have a big problem!” Our dev lead explained to her that we were in a meeting, and people were on the line, conferencing in. She insisted, “I have to let this out. People just don’t believe that our books are free!!”

A little bit of flashback, just a few weeks ago CK12 and the State of Virginia launched the first ever open Text Book entitled 21st Century Physics Flexbook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. The launch was very successful, and was followed by several important meetings between CK12 leaders  and several key goverment people to pave the way for the creation of more and better open text books. The most ommon remarks that they received was along the same tone, most do not believe that our books are really really free!

Today, we witnessed again a blog post by an active educator and author, Larry Moran, that argued beyond not believing that text books should be free, but went as far as claiming that text books should never be free. His main argument is that good text books take such an enormous amount of effort to create that it shouldn’t be given away for free.

Seth Godin’s thesis about how people are so resistant to change rings a bell. However, like Godin said, resisting to change is just the first step towards being irrelevant. Changes will happen regardless of people resisting it or not.

Open Education Resources (OER) movements will face a battle from the status quo. However, this is nothing more than a deja vu. We have all witness the exact same battle between open source movement against the big giant software companies. Right now, virtually all software companies are at least partially proponent of open source movement. Even Microsoft certified open source software to run on it’s platform.

Mahatma Gandhi said it:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

So CK12 is somewhat one of the pioneers of the inevitable, we are making free textbooks. And free doesn’t mean low quality, all our books will eventually allign to government standards.

And yes, the books are free. Free as in free beer, go ahead read them and get drunk in knowledge, and free as in William Wallace’s freedom, go ahead add/modify/customize/share them.

Comments

3 Responses to “Problem with Open Textbooks: They are Free”

1. Khawar Nehal
   April 2nd, 2009 @ 12:49 pm

   Offer some extra services for a charge like printing the books and mailing them then use the profits made to advertise.
   I think this allows more publicity to the opensource area. Example Linux distributions.
   The world has gotten used to the idea that Linux distros are free and commercial at the same time and they get to advertise.

   The idea is to calculate the max commercialization fo advertising which should be done to maximize loud noise making revenue.

   Like the large ads for firefox paid by donors.

   I shall try this idea from now on on my opensource support company and document the results as a marketing research paper.

   Regards,

   Khawar

2. ezran
   April 2nd, 2009 @ 1:08 pm

   Khawar,

   Thanks for the comment…
   CK 12 is not doing the dual commercial – free model yet like most open-source vendors.
   However, I am sure all the moves that were done in the open-source software will be taken in open education resources world.
   You got the point, man!

   It will be interesting to hear about your marketing research paper once it is out

3. Reframe It -- It's Your Web, Speak Up, Give It Context
   December 17th, 2009 @ 4:33 pm

   deeptext had this to say…

   The old UNIX tools keep being rediscovered. BASH anyone?
   Probably invented before the blogger was born.

   …

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