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Re: Open Books and XML
* Ian Bicking (bickiia@earlham.edu) [990722]:
> > 1. Just how do you expect the content of these textbooks to be produced? If
> > "Open Source" textbooks were a viable option economically, wouldn't we have
> > seen them develop with the Xerox machine, much as "black line masters" has
> > developed into a market for some kinds of worksheets. There are reasons why
> > free and Open Source code has developed in the software world. What
> > analogous reasons will motivate writers to write high-quality textbooks for
> > free? Robert's earlier comment that "On the textbook side all we have to do
> > select a set of topics,
> > create an outline for each and get people to fill in the pieces" seems to
> > treat as easy the piece of the work that seems to me much harder than
> > picking XML or some other publishing standard.
O'Reilly has started the possibility of publishing books as Open
Source, in which the book can be bought in the printed form or read
online. Norman Walsh's book on DocBook will be published in this way.
See http://www.docbook.org/ for more info on the book and publishing
OS books.
> There was talk for a while of FSF setting up something to print free
> books (technical documentation in this case) at cost, or close. I
> don't know what will come of this -- there seems to be commitment
> by the FSF to do more about documentation, but it might not end
> up extending to the actual printing process. But if this matures in
> that direction, maybe there'd be a place for textbooks too...? Or at
> least a model upon which to base it.
If you have access to the sources, printing for personal use can also
be possible. We'll have to see what O'Reilly's license will be like
for publishing for personal (or school) use. Of course printing your
own and bying a few from the publisher is still a good way to suppport
the author. (Say print your own versions for students and buy the ones
for the teachers and school library or something like that.)
ramin
--
Ramin Miraftabi Assistant, Department of Computer Science
ramin@cs.joensuu.fi University of Joensuu
http://dawn.joensuu.fi/~ramin/ Joensuu, Finland
PGP public key ID 9F7B3E51 (c) Copyright 1999