Random House Invests In Creative Commons 'Free' Textbook Publisher Flat World Knowledge
from the are-they-getting-it? dept
We've written a few times in the past about Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publisher that really seems to have embraced the sort of business models we discuss. It gives away digital versions (the infinitely abundant kind) of its textbooks for free, but charges for the scarcities, such as printed copies. It puts the books up under a Creative Commons license as well, letting anyone improve upon the works as well. Thus, it's interesting to see that established publishers are taking notice. Apparently Random House has now invested in the company. Of course, some may point out that Random House doesn't publish textbooks, but perhaps it can learn a thing or two about how FWK has embraced openness and free as a part of a larger business model.
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Filed Under: investment, open source, textbooks
Companies: flat world knowledge, random house
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Creative Commons Branding Confusion
I respectfully request you please specify which license when talking about Creative Commons. It could be Free or un-Free; although you wrote it allows derivative works, it could still restrict "commercial" use. Because their most popular licenses are their least Free, when people just say "Creative Commons" instead of which license, it adds to the CC branding confusion, which we've talked about here.
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What baffles me...
Next off what's up with replacing the textbook almost every single year? There have been no major breakthroughs in the world of mathematics so what in the last few decades right (or at least nothing that would require a brand new undergrad level textbook)? Yet and still I recall that every single math text book I bought in college having no resell value at my campus book store because it was getting replaced the next semester.
With my rant over here's my point. Like the two folks above said I can totally see whatever forces that keep textbooks artificially high and with no resell value will zero in on Flat World Knowledge and shut them down.
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Does it really give away digital versions?
If you click the right buttons, you can click through to a Scribd reader. The CC license, btw, is attribution, non-commercial, share-alike which almost certainly prohibits it from being used in for-profit schools. (And given the mercenary nature of the modern so-called non-profit schools, I would suggest that they're commercial ventures too. But that's for another flame war.)
Can you actually download a copy? I haven't figured out how and I wouldn't be surprised to find that plenty of digging yields some DRM. And even if it doesn't use something with the official letters "DRM" on it, the game plan is still the same: make it hard to get something for free and easy for someone to contribute to the development costs. In other words: artificial scarcity.
Now I'm perfectly happy with the creators being rewarded for their efforts. But I think that Mike has been a bit too eager to celebrate this one. It seems like the same old scheme with new terminology and astroturfing wrapped around it to get free press.
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