For years authors have been fighting a mostly losing battle to retain intellectual rights over their works that end up in the wild and downloadable for free.
For some reason we as a society have created the aura that the Internet magically voids all copyright laws and anything posted on the Internet MUST be free. It is one thing when a person post something for free. It is quite another thing when it is stolen and given away.
Now that you are predicting that tens of thousands of professors are being threatened with losing textbook royalties, I expect to see a massive backlash against this effort unless authors are finally given the royalties they are legally entitled to for all copies of their works sold or stolen. Regardless of medium.
As any college student can attest to, these royalties have driven textbook prices to insane heights.
Way back in 1984 I paid the outrageous sum of $85 for a paperback workbook that was no bigger than a edition of Life Magazine. It was co-written by 4 professors on the campus and was a mandatory requirement for all of their courses. By design you could not resell the book because it contained the quizzes for the semester. Making the book a shredded mess after tearing out a dozen quizzes.
This piece is from 2000, but the percentages textbook authors get have not changed much. Professors will not allow the golden goose to be killed on this billion dollar a year racket.
http://mountainplains.org/articles/2000/opinion/writing_a_textbook.html
Student groups like to blame publishers, but the fact is they refuse to admit their beloved professors are complicit in the scheme.
http://www.studentpirgs.org/campaigns/sp/make-textbooks-affordable
Are the days of $400 college textbooks coming to an end? Initiatives from Open Educational Resources proponents, and now publishers, may mean more course content from low or no-cost online resources.
Tipping point for expensive college textbooks? Photo by Joe McKendrick.
In previous posts, we’ve talked about the disruption of higher education, through initiatives such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) that deliver world-class education to students of all ages across the globe, at little or no charge. We’ve also talked about the disruption of the publishing industry, and the movement from print to digital. In between those two worlds has been the college textbook industry, which also now appears ripe for disruption.
That’s the observation of Slate’s Kevin Carey, who provides details on the emerging “Open Educational Resources” movement, responsible in recent years for the provisioning of “high-quality texts, videos, charts, problem sets, and other useful content in a huge array of subjects,” contributed by advocates of open education as well as college professors themselves. A new site, Boundless.com, has been launched to help curate the large database of items now available online to students, learners and educators.
College textbook publishers are not taking this new online competition lying down, however. Earlier in 2012, three publishers sued Boundless, claiming the startup has “has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights.”
However, likely in recognition of the inevitability of the coming wave of disruption that is beginning to sweep the textbook industry, one of the litigants in the suit, Pearson, announced in November a new venture, Project Blue Sky, which, as Carey describes it, will “use a search engine developed by a company called Gooru specifically for online education, allowing people to ’search, select and seamlessly integrate Open Education Resources.’”
The Gooru search engine was developed by a nonprofit organization to maintain and offer rich collections of multimedia resources, digital textbooks, videos, games and quizzes created by educators in the Gooru community.
There’s been plenty of discussion and efforts in recent times as to how college textbook content will be delivered in the digital age. Apple, for one, has promised major disruption via delivery of all textbooks over iPads. There has even been some controversy over whether students can as readily absorb material delivered digitally. But OER proponents seek to make content delivery more componentized and cost effective.
