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Do Open-Source Books Work?by Ben Crowell?????? will the internet change book publishing? This article examines a new crop of math and science textbooks that are available for free over the internet, and discusses what they have to tell us about whether the open-source software model can be translated into book publishing.?This article is copyright 2000 by Benjamin Crowell, and is open-content licensed under the OPL license, article was discussed on the Slashdot forum 26 Sep 2000. Since then, I've started a web site called The Assayer for user-contributed book reviews, with an emphasis on free books. The number of free books and the number of open-source books has grown since then, and The Assayer is a good place to find them. If you're interested in old public-domain books that are free on the web, check out The Assayer's links page. I wrote followup articles in 2002 and 2005.Ben Franklin[1] figured out that information wants to be free, so in 1731 he invented the lending library. It was no Napster: this eighteenth-century information superhighway was meant for such serious purposes as education and fomenting revolution. Franklin wrote, "These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges." Words mattered. In the golden age of ink and wood pulp, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Zola's J'Accuse letter[2] were data that packed a punch.We take the information revolution seriously, but how serious are we about serious information? Can we really free our minds if we power on, dial up, and log in? You wouldn't think so based on any changes in the U.S. education system. A young relative of mine brought home his grade-school science textbook, and one of its main modules was a detailed discussion of dinosaurs, yet it never mentioned evolution. Bad textbooks are the rule, not the exception. A recent critical survey of American history textbooks[3] is dedicated "to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks," but the author might have well included the rest of the curriculum. Poor textbooks were probably already inspiring complaints back when they were scratched on clay tablets with a pointed stick, but I'll argue below that books are actually getting worse, and that both the problem and the possible solution have to do with technology and economics. The Problem is EconomicsMany e-businesses have found out that technology can make you broke as easily as it can make you rich; in publishing, it seems that technology has driven the profit out of textbooks. Color printing has been getting cheaper, and full color, though still fantastically expensive to set up for production, is now considered mandatory for high school and introductory college textbooks. At the same time, desktop publishing software and the increasing digitization of printing have made it possible to prepare new editions more rapidly. The confluence of these technologies has created a vicious circle. Rising production costs drive up bookstore prices, which makes more students buy used books, which reduces sales. To kill off the used book market, publishers bring out a new edition every few years, with just enough changes to make it impractical to use it side by side in the same classroom with the previous edition. To compensate for the added cost of tooling up for so many new editions, publishers raise their prices, which starts the whole cycle over again. After decades of merely keeping pace with inflation, textbook prices have recently headed through the roof.[5]In this climate of vanishingly thin margins, the most successful textbook is little more than a loss leader, and one with more modest sales is a disaster. Every book has to be a home run. For fear of losing sales in socially conservative school districts, K-12 biology books often soft-pedal evolution, misrepresent it, or omit it entirely.[6] History books avoid controversy by propagating the myth that John Brown was insane, or by failing to mention that the Vietnam war began as a war of independence in a French colony.[3] The home-run syndrome's most consistent effect is to inflate the list of topics, so that no book will be rejected by anyone for leaving out a specific item. In my field, physics, it is commonly observed that each edition is worse than the previous one, as the pressure for more topics squeezes out the room for honest explanations, resulting in a cookbook of formulas.Free Books, But No Open-Source BooksIf bad books result from higher prices, free books would seem to be the solution. Textbooks, besides their intrinsic importance as gateways to industrial-strength information, are a good test bed for evaluating innovations in how books are written and distributed. The authors of math and science textbooks in particular are unlikely to be intimidated by technology, but their goals and methods are more representative of the practical approach of authors in general than in the case of computer manuals and computer science textbooks, [4] whose authors may be willing to put up with a great deal of pain to be on the bleeding edge of information technology. When I set out to write my own free physics textbook, I found that it was quite hard to get any information on how a free book could be done in practice, and this article is the result of my attempt at a (completely unscientific) survey of how free textbooks have actually been done. Quite a few free math and science textbooks are on the web now, [7],[8],[9],[10],[11] but interestingly, none of them seem to have followed the successful, highly publicized, and legally solid open-source software approach.[12] In fact, the most highly publicized digital textbooks are based on a model that is to open source as antimatter is to matter: a dental school[13] has required its students to buy all their books on a single DVD, which expires and stops working if the students don't pay a hefty annual fee!Does the neglect of the open-source book concept outside the computer arena mean that there is something intrinsically wrong with the idea of an open-source book? Or does the rest of the world just not "get it" yet? As we'll see, the reality is more complicated than either extreme point of view.Among the free books I've studied, the one that comes closest to the collaborative spirit of the open source movement is the Biophysics Textbook On-Line (BTOL),[9] in which each chapter has been written by a different author. The most important reason why the open-source software movement emphasizes collaboration-building is that the projects they tackle are often simply too big for the lone-wolf approach. Likewise, the BTOL was written because it had become apparent that the field was getting so large that the previously standard text was never going to be updated. When I wrote one of the authors, Lou DeFelice, to ask how the BTOL folks had been so successful in their community-building, he repled, "The BTOL is tied to a Society that already has an established community, regular meetings, newsletters, etc. We tap into all of this structure. For example, when a new article is posted we announce it in the Biophysical Society Newsletter. I would think that other fields might benefit from endorsement by an established society that already serves the field."The most surprising result of my survey, however, was that there were no books that were really open source in the sense in which the term is used in the open-source movement. The BTOL is collaborative but closed-source. Some authors have made their source code available, [8],[11] but none of the source-available books are collaborations, and they do not have licensing agreements of the type developed to make sure free software stays free.Do We Need Open Source?Maybe that sounds like a criticism, but I don't intend it that way. My own book, although free, isn't even source-available, much less open-source. (This is mainly because of certain technical and economic issues discussed below.) But the open-source software model is designed to solve some real problems. For example, open-software licenses and culture are designed to prevent the problems that can arise when different people's software has to be put together in one package, e.g. to make sure that Linux can't be stopped dead in its tracks because some critical part of it turns out to be patented. The BTOL, on the other hand, might be difficult to publish as a single, bound book, because the individual authors own the copyrights on their own chapters, and there is no licensing agreement. An important insight of the inventors of open source was that copyrighted information with a carefully designed licensing agreement (a "copyleft") is in some sense more free than either copyrighted information or uncopyrighted information.[12]. Do authors even want other people to be able to modify what they wrote? Although software and books are not perfectly analogous, I feel that this particular concern about applying open-source methods to books is based on a misunderstanding of what open source is. While open-source software licenses do guarantee anyone the right to modify the program, they do not guarantee that those modifications will become standard or widespread. I could, for example, fiddle around with the delicate inner workings of my own copy of the Linux kernel, most likely breaking it due to my deficient programming skills. But I simply would not be allowed to tinker with the version everyone else depends on until I had proven my transcendent programming talents to a very critical cadre of the world's most fanatical software geeks. Nobody was ever able to force Linus Torvalds to take his Linux project in a direction he didn't want, because he owned the copyrights to its vital parts. The open-source approach allows the project's originator to exert whatever degree of control she/he deems appropriate. If I want to limit other people's contributions to my book severely, so that they can only report errata and provide supplements and add-ons, I can do that (although an approach that strict would probably not inspire very many people to participate). When it comes to sharing the pen, "if" and "how much" are up to the author, but a more interesting question is "how?" What legal and cultural framework will work? Are open-source software methods directly applicable? The BTOL collaboration, for instance, has an original take on this. Writes Victor Bloomfield, "It is important, of course, to maintain the integrity of each author's chapter (closed source). However, the volume editor can choose to include more than one treatment of the same material (semi-open source)." It's also not hard to imagine creative projects that would be impossible with a closed-source model. In my field, for example, the phenomenon of textbook bloat is particularly out of control when it comes to the number of homework problems at the end of each chapter. One of the main things that deterred me from shopping my book around to the traditional- style publishers was knowing that I would be expected to crank out roughly a thousand additional homework problems in addition to the few hundred I'd already written. Writing homework problems is an activity that can be done in parallel by many people, and a stockpile of problems on the web would be a valuable resource for every teacher in the field. In fact, quite a few physics teachers already have their own individual collections on the web. A more general collection would also fit well with the collaborative approach used in open-source software, since there is no need to maintain a consistent authorial voice, and the bug-finding philosophy of the open-source software movement is applicable: homework problems can have bugs, people can usually agree on what constitutes a bug, bugs are hard to find, and bug-finding can be done in parallel by many people. (Incidentally, when publishers kill off the used book market by bringing out gratuitous new editions, one of their standard techniques for creating incompatibility between editions is to fiddle with the homework problems. Having a public collection on the web might help to eliminate this particular dysfunctional behavior.)Another possible application of the open-source paradigm to textbooks would be the creation of sets of notes on applications. In physics, for example, ideas about torque and angular momentum can be applied to martial arts and gymnastics, but I simply don't have the expertise to write anything interesting on these topics. The availability of such a set of resources online would help to reduce textbook bloat, and would also allow students to read about applications that truly interest them. Likewise, scientists who lament the sparseness of applications in math textbooks could be invited to contribute applications themselves.Do Technical Problems Prevent Open-Source Books?Unfortunately going open-source isn't as simple as just adopting an open-source license. As I toyed with the idea of open-sourcing my own book, and then began to study how other people were doing things, it became clear that there were some serious technical hurdles. Imagine that Linus Torvalds was trying to get the Linux collaboration off the ground, but none of the prospective partners used the same computer language. This is pretty much the situation with desktop publishing software. Quark Express and PageMaker are the most popular packages for laying out books, at least among professionals, but they are very expensive and not fully interoperable. Quite a few physicists and mathematicians know LaTeX, but it's far from being a universal standard, and it does not allow the kind of control that is necessary for a book with a complex layout and lots of illustrations. (To be fair, many LaTeX users would consider this a feature, not a bug, since it results from the philosophy of separating form from content.) The true lingua francas are word-processor formats. Victor Bloomfield of the BTOL project writes, "Authors typically send word-processing (most commonly Word, but others as well) and graphics files. It is indeed a hassle..." The sheer amount of work involved in getting a book ready for open-sourcing has also deterred authors like Jim Hefferon and me.A more subtle problem is that except for LaTeX, none of these formats lend themselves to communal editing. The open-source software community uses a program called CVS (Concurrent Version System) to allow people within a trusted community to change and edit the files from a large software project, and to resolve conflicts that occur when two people are simultaneously working on the same file. CVS can be used for any kind of plain-text, human-editable files, not just computer programs, but it can't be used with files from any of the popular word processors or desktop publishing programs, since they're all in binary formats.No Paper, No Problem?Nearly all the books I surveyed are distributed purely digitally. Author Warren Siegel[8] says, "...I'm trying to discourage printing as much as possible... I see a lot of printing/publishing as more habit than convenience, with dead trees rotting in people's offices rather than in the forests." A few authors (e.g. Jim Hefferon[11]) distribute bound, printed books to their own students and encourage instructors at other schools who use the book to do the same, but this may have the effect of discouraging adoption of the book, since professors may not want the hassle. Students do want printed, bound books, and are willing to pay for them. I now have my own self-publishing business, but I originally distributed my book to students through print-to-order sales at Kinko's. Although Kinko's was expensive, roughly 90% of my students bought the books from Kinko's rather than downloading and printing them, which, after all, results in single-sided, unbound output. (I explained to them that I didn't get any royalties from Kinko's, so there was no personal motivation to buy the books rather than downloading them.) I have never had a student forgo dead-tree format completely and read the entire book from a computer monitor.For my own book[7] I'm now using free digital distribution side by side with commercial distribution of printed copies by wholesale. The issue here is that printing has high startup costs, and running a business is, frankly, a lot less fun than teaching and writing. The big investment required to self-publish a book is also in conflict with openness; giving up the monopoly on selling printed copies would make it even more scary to try to make back my money.Big booksellers such as and the bricks-and-mortar chains offer various options that let authors avoid the hassles and risks of setting up their own cottage industries, but their systems are not particularly attractive in my opinion. Amazon, for instance, offers a service in which they handle the retail ordering side of things while the author simply sends them wholesale shipments as needed. The problem is money. Amazon says they pay a "royalty" of 45%, which sounds generous, but is misleading. The author is responsible for production, so the 45% "royalty" is really an 82% retail markup, expressed as a percentage of the author's net. Considering how expensive short-run printing is, it's hard to imagine bringing a textbook to market at a reasonable price via this service. Other services handle both production and marketing, but are not able to do illustrated books.What Next?The solution to the difficulties of paper distribution is probably to limp along with the variety of approaches we've already been using, and wait for printing technology to solve the problem. The increasing digitization of the printing process and the emergence of efficient print-to-order systems is gradually making short-run print distribution cheaper and easier. I don't see any general solution on the horizon to the technical problems involved in true open-source books. However, some of the interesting projects that require an open source approach might be doable with HTML format, which can be used with CVS. Although HTML is not printer-friendly enough to be suitable for a complete book, it might be fine for some of the more limited, modular applications such as homework sets and application notes.References[1] The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. >>FTP link #1 >>FTP link #2 [2] See this online article about Zola and the Dreyfus affair.[3] James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, The New Press, New York.[4] Two good examples are Open Docs Publishing and Bruce Eckel.[5] For more about the recent steep increases in textbook prices, see this article.[6] All biology textbooks in Alabama must have a disclaimer pasted in the front with a text that begins, "This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact." >>Link. For an example of a high school textbook that incorporates a scientifically faulty religious view on evolution, see this link. The treatment of evolution tends to be worse in the lower grades. One middle-school text, for example, says that fossil evidence "suggests" dinosaurs existed and "suggests" that many species have become extinct, and devotes 130 pages to the species Homo sapiens without discussing our relationship to the other primates. [7] Ben Crowell, Light and Matter. >>Link.[8] Warren Siegel, Fields. >>Download link. >>Informational link.[9] Biophysics Textbook On-Line. >>Link[10] Frank Firk, Essential Physics. >>Link[11] Jim Hefferon, Linear Algebra. >>Link[12] The basic idea of open-source software is that the program is copyrighted by its authors, but it comes with a licensing agreement that preserves everyone's right to obtain the source code and modify it if they wish. ("Source code" refers to the instructions as entered by the programmer, as opposed to the binary form in which proprietary software is supplied, which is unintelligible to humans and virtually impossible to modify.) The press has sometimes not done a good job of distinguishing the open-source movement (I made it, now you can have it for free) from piracy (you made it, now I'll copy it whether you like it or not), although some open-source idealists are in sympathy with piracy, believing that all forms of information should be free. The classic exposition of the open-source software philosophy is Eric Raymond's essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The Free Software Foundation argues for maximum freedom of information on moral grounds. Two well-known licenses for applying the open-source concept to other forms of expression besides computer code are the OPL and the FDL.[13] For more information about antibooks in dental schools, see this Slashdot article.History of Revisions2000 Sep 27 Added a reference to the FDL license in footnote 11. Added links to Ben Franklin's autobiography.2000 Oct 1 Added more detail about evolution in K-12 biology textbooks.series | Light and Matter | The Assayer Free Books: A Sneaky Successby Ben Crowell?????? the height of the dot-com bubble, twenty-somethings with goatees were telling us that e-books were the wave of the future. Those e-books they had in mind were like proprietary software: they weren't free (-as-in-anything), they only worked on proprietary hardware, and they came with shrinkwrap licenses and digital rights management. They failed. The successful model that's sneaking under the radar is the copylefted book. ?This article is copyright 2002 by Benjamin Crowell, and is open-content licensed under the GFDL 1.1 licenseOther articles in this intermittent series are this one from 2000, and this one from 2005.Two years ago, the idea of a free book --- a book whose author had intentionally made it free on the internet --- was largely unknown and untested.[1] Looming on the horizon instead, with every prospect of success, were the "anti-books:" electronic books encumbered with odious licensing terms and restrictive digital rights management technology.[2] You wouldn't be able to loan such a book to a friend, public libraries couldn't acquire it, and if you stopped paying your rental fee, it would expire and become unreadable! What the marketroids predicted didn't come true. The anti-book has been an abject failure. What seems to be succeeding instead is the copylefted book. My own online catalog, The Assayer,[3] currently lists 385 books that are free as in beer (i.e., can be read without paying money), of which 50 are free as in speech (come with copyleft licenses, and are guaranteed to stay free forever). My list is based only on random websurfing done by me and other users of my web site, so the true number of free books is certainly much greater than this. What's perhaps more significant than the quantity of books on the list is their quality: at least two of them[4],[5] seem to be the standard textbooks in their field today. Displacing Unfree BooksSo at least in some cases, free books have displaced unfree ones in the marketplace. This is a remarkable achievement! For all the open-source software movement's successes, I'm not aware of any case in which an entrenched proprietary program was pushed out of first place in the market by open-source software. We should sit up and pay attention to what this tells us about the future of the free information movement. How did it happen, and why has it happened with books but not with software? One difference between books and software is that unlike books, software is easy to emulate and easy to add features to. An innovation like the graphical user unterface can be embraced and extended by proprietary software companies like Apple and Microsoft, and the winner in the marketplace will be whoever has the best marketing. Conversely, an open-source project like can try to compete with an entrenched proprietary program like MS Office, but will always have to play catch-up when Microsoft adds a new feature that one user out of a thousand comes to consider indispensible. None of this happens with books. Microsoft can't just say, "Romeo and Juliet was a big success for Shakespeare, so we'll write something similar." Books also have no barrier to entry. Most people think computers are scary and confusing. They're willing to keep paying for new versions of Word because they don't want to have to learn a different word processor, and they're worried about compatibility. Books, however, are easy to use, and most computer users know how to use an electronic book that is in the ubiquitous (and nonproprietary) Adobe Acrobat format. Dead TreesReaders want their books on paper, and this is another advantage that authors of free books enjoy and open-source programmers don't. A printed book is something you can sell. An open-source software vendor like Mandrake can have a tough time convincing users to pay for something they could get for free. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly, however, have found that they can increase sales of their printed books by giving away the digital versions for free. This has also been my own experience with my self-published physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can browse the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if they like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of a printed copy. By the way, here's another place where the dot-bombers goofed. Remember a few years ago when they were predicting that print-on-demand publishing would be the wave of the future? You were supposed to be able to go to your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, ask for an obscure book on medieval Bulgaria, and have it printed and bound while you sipped a $5 cappucino. It didn't happen, probably in part because the technology was unwieldy and in part because the store's employees would have had to show an unusual level of craftsmanship and attention to detail considering their pay and their already busy workloads. The Cathedral, Not the BazaarEric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar[6] has had a big effect on how hackers think about open-source software. (And by the way, this is another example of a book that is free in digital form, and can also be bought in print.) Raymond described a model of collaborative software development in which a large, geographically dispersed group of programmers worked together in a seemingly chaotic way. This bazaar model was to be contrasted with the cathedral model, in which everything is done according to a detailed, preexisting plan. The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete failure in the world of free books, although not for want of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix Programming[7], which appears to be languishing. I can only think of one high-quality, finished bazaar-model free book, a textbook in which each author wrote one chapter.[4] The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not seem surprising, since to most people it sounds like the silly party game where each person takes a turn adding more onto a story. We normally assume that an author has a unique voice, and that authorship can't be delegated. However, quite a high percentage of the world's free books seem to be software documentation, which in principle should be amenable to a decentralized approach. The GFDL copyleft license for books is clearly aimed at such projects, and requires, for example, that the book be maintained in a form that can be edited with free software, so that it will never become a pig in a poke if the original author loses interest or goes incommunicado. Group authorship, however, just doesn't seem to have caught on, even in software documentation. Maybe the explanation is that in software projects, the number of programmers interested in writing documentation averages to less than one. However, that wouldn't explain the failure of the Nupedia open-content encyclopedia project, which would seem to have been ideally suited for group authorship. My own experience attempting to contribute an article to Nupedia suggests a simpler theory: people make free information because it's fun, and group authorship is not always fun. After I wrote the original version of this article, several people pointed out the existence of Wikipedia, which was meant to be a minor ``fun'' project alongside the Nupedia online encyclopedia. Unlike Nupedia, Wikipedia has taken off, and has a lot of people contributing articles. This suggests that bazaar-style book projects can work, but whether they'll work may depend a lot on how they're organized, and on whether they're fun to participate in. Note added December 2002: I dipped my toes in the water as a participant in Wikipedia, and had some fun at first working on some of the physics articles. However, it seems to me that Wikipedia has a problem with certain articles getting hijacked by cranks. If Nupedia was too strict and regimented, Wikipedia seems to have the opposite problem: a lack of serious quality control. Specifically, take a look at the articles on certain topics related to astrology, e.g., Horoscope, Zodiac, and Walter Mercado. If you click on "older versions," you can see the history of how these articles were edited. In my opinion, the true believers in astrology have continually rebuffed attempts by various people (including me) to make these articles neutral in tone, rather than credulous and one-sided. Skeptics add some text to try to balance the treatment a little, and then the true believers delete it again. To me, this is the antithesis of what ``free'' is about: silencing any voice with which one disagrees. In my opinion, the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects were both interesting social and technological experiments, but neither model can be successful in the long term without some big changes. Right now, I'd be reluctant to look anything up on Wikipedia and trust that I was getting the whole story. The good news, however, is that even if (as I hope) Wikipedia's social and technological structure mutates and improves in the future, that doesn't mean all the old text is lost. It's still free information, and it can be incorporated into a new and improved version of the encyclopedia. Free Forever, or Just For Now?Eric Raymond's name is closely associated with the bazaar model, while Richard Stallman's evokes the cathedral, as demonstrated most dramatically by the contrast between Stallman's HURD kernel project and the Linux kernel. There is another way in which Stallman's unique point of view has been prescient when it comes to free books. One of his key concerns has been how to make sure that once information was set free, it would never be recaptured and made proprietary again. Apparently this focus came from his experience with the Emacs editor --- Stallman wrote the editor, incorporating some code that other programmers had shared with him, and a dispute later arose in which his coauthors tried to keep him from distributing the program freely. Just as Stallman's cathedral style has turned out to be more typical of free books than of free programs, I think his horror of backsliding is more apropos for prose than for code. Free software predates Stallman's invention of copyleft, and old no-license freeware like Donald Knuth's TeX has shown no particular tendency to become unfree (and the Emacs dispute, as far as I can tell, was simply a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if the authors had made an agreement in writing). Books are different. Self-publishing a book is much more difficult than self-publishing a program, and print publishing is a capital-intensive business. Nearly all authors need to work with a publishing house if they want to see their books in print. In most cases, the book contract gives the copyright to the publisher. (There are standard contracts for most types of books, and authors generally have a hard time negotiating any special terms.) Many authors are not willing to copyleft a book because they're afraid it will be a stumbling block if they want to sell it to a publisher later. It's very common to find a free-as-in-beer book available for downloading, but with a note on the author's web page that the book is free ``for now.'' In other words, the day the author gets a book deal, the web page will quietly evaporate, and the book will be gone from the world of free information. I've also seen cases where a book was available in electronic form from the publisher's web site, but later the publisher stopped making it available for downloading. Addison-Wesley, for example, has done this with some of its technical books. One author's web page[8] states, Thanks to the adventurous spirit of our publisher, A K Peters, Ltd., you can now download the entire book "A=B" to yourself right now. [...] This offer is good until April 1, 2000, at which time it may be withdrawn. The book is still available for downloading, but who knows for how long. A book called Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide used to be a free download from the authors' web page, but now it's only available in electronic form through O'Reilly's Safari program, which costs money. R-E-S-P-E-C-TWe respect books. One reason has always been their potential permanence, which makes it especially worrisome that free books have such a tendency to vanish or become unfree. Another reason is economics. In the middle ages, books were awesome objects simply because they cost so much to create --- a rich man could own five or ten. Even after the invention of the printing press, a big initial investment was needed in order to publish a book. The assumption was that if you could get your book published, it must be good. Somehow it had risen to the top of what editors universally refer to as the ``slush pile.'' The World-Wide Web changed all that. The web brought cheap publishing to the masses, so inevitably it cheapened publishing. Nobody is terribly impressed when they hear that I wrote a book and put it on the web --- what impresses them is when they hold the bound, printed object in their hands. We still need a way to tell good books from bad ones, but when it comes to free books, we no longer have a publisher to make an editorial decision. Who is the gatekeeper? We still need intelligent, qualified people to help us sift the wheat from the chaff, but when it comes to free books, the judgment of quality can come after publication, not before. This is a wonderful thing! Top-40 radio is a sample of what you get from the modern media conglomerates if you give them centralized control before publication. The web can make publishing free --- free as in freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility, and that's why I'll end with a request. Please take the time to write a short review of a free book on The Assayer. If you haven't read a free book recently, you might be surprised at how much good reading you can get for free --- browse The Assayer and look for books that have a dandelion flower or bud next to their titles, indicating that they're free. References[1] Ben Crowell, Do Open-Source Books Work? >>Link[2] Clifford Lynch, The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World >>Link[3] The Assayer >>Link[4] On-Line Biophysics Textbook >>Link. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Link[5] Warren Siegel, Fields >>Link. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Link[6] Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar >>Link. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Link[7] Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming >>Link. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Link[8] Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf, Doron Zeilberger, A=B >>Link. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Linkseries | Light and Matter | The AssayerAll Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Booksby Ben Crowell?????? the cost of college textbooks up 62% over the last decade,[1] pressure is building for an alternative model of publishing: the free book. Five years ago, an author had to be very persistent --- maybe even a little crazy --- to try the new approach. But now a whole new infrastructure is springing up to make it easier. ?This article is copyright 2005 by Benjamin Crowell, and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (or, at your option, under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2, with no invariant sections, no front-cover texts, and no back-cover texts).You mean like Wikipedia?Five years ago, people looked at me funny when I expressed my enthusiasm for free books. You mean like Project Gutenberg? Downloading Hamlet for free? No no, I explained, I was talking about books intentionally set free by their authors. Huh? You know, like Linux. Open-source books. You mean like that party game where you sit in a circle, and everybody takes turns making up the next part of the story? No no no, I'd explain, serious tomes on weighty subjects: calculus, Proust, cell biology. This would be received with a look of pity, or maybe a hint that I might need to talk to a mental health professional. These days the response is, "Oh, you mean like Wikipedia?" That's progress. In 1950, science fiction author Robert Heinlein (of Stranger in a Strange Land fame) was asked by the editor of a science fiction magazine to make serious predictions of what the world would be like in the year 2000.[2] At that time, Heinlein's fictional depictions of 2000 featured a lot of flying cars, but in his nonfiction article he did say some sensible things about how progress actually works. Progress is exponential. Over the short term, an exponential curve doesn't look very impressive, and if you extrapolate it linearly, you won't think anything all that exciting is going to happen. But in the long term, the curve goes ballistic. Johann Gutenberg thought his printing press would allow people who weren't quite so rich to have their own Bibles. He would never have imagined the public library, much less the internet. Giving it away isn't free.The most notable recent progress in the world of free books is that a kind of infrastructure is starting to come together to support them. This article is the third in an intermittent series. In the first one,[3] written in 2000, a big barrier I pointed out was the problem with the lack of appropriate open-source software for desktop publishing: you have to eat your own dog food, and there was no way that open-source books would ever get off the ground if they had to be produced using an array of expensive and mutually incompatible closed-source software. But since then I've learned the hard way that software wasn't the only barrier. Although my second article,[4] in 2002, was wildly optimistic, I was finding that my own physics textbooks, which I'd tried to set free in the wild, were acting like twenty-somethings who couldn't afford to move out on their own because their jobs at WalMart were just barely paying for their car insurance. Professors at other colleges were adopting my books, which was exciting, but those professors wanted printed copies for themselves and their students. One day I woke up and found myself running a small business --- and it wasn't just small, it was small, inefficient, time-consuming, and unprofitable. I had forgotten the flip side of Heinlein's dictum of exponential progress: although we tend to underestimate for the far future, we also tend to overestimate for the near future. Flying cars didn't happen by 2000, because, well, for one thing you couldn't yet find a service station that sold plutonium. The infrastructure wasn't there yet. I think the infrastructure for free books is only now starting to be built, which is why, although there are now over 1000 free books listed on a web site I run that catalogs them,[5] those thousand books have still had relatively little impact. One of those thousand books is Wikipedia, and although it's atypical in many ways, Wikipedia is a particularly dramatic illustration of one of the infrastructural problems I'm talking about: bandwidth. The Wikimedia Foundation depends on an international server farm consisting of over a hundred machines.[6] On a smaller scale, bandwidth is going to be an issue for anyone serving up a popular, illustrated book. As my own books have been downloaded more and more, my webhosting costs kept escalating, eventually reaching $100 a month.[7] The authors of one free organic chemistry textbook[8] have gone so far as to throttle back the load on their server by requiring prospective readers to register and give an e-mail address before they can access the book. The problem is that many of those prospective readers will balk, and that will keep the book from gaining mind-share --- college professors are used to being courted assiduously by book reps, and to getting so many unsolicited books sent to them by publishers that they can use them as doorstops. I've also learned what a capital-intensive business print publishing is. With traditional printing technology, the unit cost goes down dramatically as the length of the press run increases, and that economic imperative meant that I soon had about $10,000 invested in a closet full of books. Meanwhile, my wife, who handles the family finances, was warning me that I was losing money. Webhosting, printing, and advertising were adding up to more than I was bringing in. the new infrastructureThe whole business of free books was harder than I'd though it would be, so hard that it probably would have deterred most prospective authors if they'd known what they were getting into. One of the lessons of Wikipedia's success is that you have to make things easy for authors; its philosophy of instant gratification was the reason it did so well where its stuffier, slower-moving predecessor Nupedia had failed. One item of good news is that within the last few years, it's become possible for a someone who isn't an ubergeek to create an illustrated textbook using open-source software. Scribus, a GUI desktop publishing application, makes it easy to do a book with a complex visual layout, something that could previously be done using LaTeX, but only with the sacrifice of many goats. Inkscape, a 2003 fork of the open-source illustration program Sodipodi, has made rapid progress, and is now in the same league as Adobe Illustrator. PDF, long treated with suspicion by the free software community, has emerged as a lingua franca for online books, and there is now a hefty toolchain for creating and working on PDF files, including Scribus, Inkscape, and a long-awaited 1.x release of PdfTex, as well as many smaller utilities such as pdftk and pdfripimage. Color management had for a long time been a shortcoming of Linux compared to Windows and MacOS, partly due to patents, but is now incorporated into a few Linux applications such as Scribus via the littlecms color management system. OpenOffice's ability to read Microsoft Word documents has also helped to alleviate the former problem of authors finding that once they had written something in Word format, they were forever locked into proprietary software. One justification offered by publishers for the astronomical prices of college textbooks is the high cost of permissions fees for materials such as photographs, artwork, or anthologized text. Since September 2004, the free information community has had a weapon in its arsenal that's unavailable to traditional publishers: Wikimedia Commons, a repository containing hundreds of thousands of photos.[9] Since most of the images are under copyleft licenses, they can be used in copylefted free books, but not in traditional copyrighted books. Although five years ago many of us who were interested in free books envisioned the sharing of copylefted words, in fact it looks like the commonest currency of collaboration is turning out to be not text but pictures. A positive development related to this has been the increasing standardization of licenses. There's a pretty clear consensus these days that new copylefted materials should be licensed either under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license or the GNU Free Documentation License, or both.[10] As a textbook author, dual licensing my books under these two licences allows me to legally use essentially 100% of the contents of Wikimedia Commons. Even for an author who has no particular interest in free information as an abstract ideal, the use of non-proprietary photos opens up the possibility of using free digital copies of a book as sales tools. That's an option that traditional publishers don't have, because permissions fees are computed according to how widely the book is distributed.[11] But even if there's no legal objection to giving your book away for free, there's still that pesky issue of the cost of bandwidth. Luckily there's some new infrastructure coming along to take care of this as well. Jason Turgeon has founded a site called ,[12] whose mission is to mirror free books and take the load off of authors. The Wikibooks project, which aims to extend the success of Wikipedia to the creation of a whole library of books, is backed by the horsepower of the Wikimedia Foundation server farm. And finally, there's an interesting company called ,[13] dating back to 2002, which is opening up new possibilities for distributing books, both electronically and in print. Has the time come for print-on-demand?Lulu's main business is print-on-demand (POD), which means that instead of producing thousands of copies of a book at once as on a traditional printing press, modern technology and automation make it economically feasible to produce books one at a time, as requested by customers. For a long time, I was very skeptical about POD. It always seemed to be a technology that was supposed to be viable soon, but that nobody seemed to be able to execute successfully as a business. The whole field also carried the taint of the sleazy vanity publishing industry, infamous for luring would-be authors into paying money to get their books published and then leaving them high and dry. Lulu, refreshingly, doesn't claim to be anything it's not. What it is is ... well ... funky might be the word. Among its prominently displayed bestselling titles are "Raw Foods for Busy People," a calendar with pictures of "SAM, World's Ugliest Dog," and the infamous hoax novel "Atlanta Nights," originally written as an expose of one of the less honest vanity publishers and now being sold for its value as humor.[14] Lulu's pricing works nicely for free-information books: "Because we support the free and open exchange of information, if you decide not to get a royalty, we also waive our commission. The selling price of your printed book, calendar, CD or DVD will be its production cost only; download versions are free." What this boils down to is that if you have a book that you want to set free, and you don't have any ambition to make money from it, you can distribute the PDF file through Lulu without paying for bandwidth, and readers who are so inclined will be able to buy printed paperback copies for $4.53 plus 2 cents per page. One textbook author who has used Lulu is Prof. Richard Fitzpatrick at UT Austin.[15] Modestly referring to his books as lecture notes, Fitzpatrick writes, "My motivation for writing these notes was mainly that I did not want to be tied to any particular textbook. In England, where I was educated, lecturers are (or were in my student days) expected to generate their own courses, and textbooks are mainly used for reference purposes and/or for background material. I have never liked the U.S. model where profs seem to be able to get away with essentially reading the assigned textbook to their classes. Obviously, another consideration is that I have my own approach to certain subjects which does not necessarily correspond exactly to the approaches used in available textbooks. Finally, I am, of course, appalled by the astronomical cost of Physics textbooks (especially textbooks for lower division survey courses, which are also pretty awful, and getting worse edition by edition). Hence, by making my notes available to my students, I give them the option of not buying the official textbook." On the first day of class, Fitzpatrick hands out photocopies of his book to his students for free in a condensed format, with four pages reduced to fit on one page. If they want something nicer, they can then download the PDF file for free and print it out themselves, or order a bound copy from Lulu for about $9 for a 240-page black and white book. Fitzpatrick, who doesn't take any royalty from his books' sales on Lulu, says, "I have been very happy with my experience with Lulu... The only problem I see with Lulu is the rather large time-delay between ordering a book and getting it in the mail. I think that Lulu should concentrate on fixing this problem." Fitzpatrick's books have been used by other professors, both at UT and at other schools. Another author who uses Lulu is East Tennessee State University computer science professor David Tarnoff. Tarnoff's students can download Computer Organization and Design Fundamentals[16] for free, or buy a printed copy of the 434-page book from Lulu for $16.98 --- about 80% less than the cost of the proprietary book he'd been using before. (He takes a $3 royalty on each printed copy.) Since I originally wrote this article last year, I've experimented with producing and selling my own books via lulu. Although in many ways it's an improvement over what I was doing before, I've also run into many problems, and at this point I would be very cautious about recommending lulu to other people. One big issue is that, for a company whose entire business is built around the pdf format, lulu is not actually very good at supporting the pdf format correctly; they don't coordinate properly with the subcontractors who actually print the books, and this has led to a constant stream of problems, in which books that had sold a bunch of copies all of a sudden don't print one day, resulting in a cancellation of the school's order. I've also had a lot of problems with the poor quality of their packaging on wholesale orders. wikibooksWikibooks,[17] founded in July 2003, represents a completely different approach than Lulu's. One dramatic contrast is that where Lulu emphasizes print publishing, Wikibooks almost completely ignores it: although every book has a "printable version" link provided automatically, in nearly all cases the printable version doesn't actually work --- it's just a table of contents. Wikibooks also differs from Lulu by being completely noncommercial and open to participation by anyone. One good result of this is that due to peer review, Wikibooks has relatively little of the crank literature that permeates most of the self-publishing world. In a C|Net interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has expressed high --- some might even say grandiose --- goals for the project, predicting in an interview that traditional publishers are "going to have to recognize that there's a fundamental shift in the marketplace. Some of them will prosper. Some of them will figure out the new regime and find out ways to add value. Others will stick their heads in the sand and get slaughtered."[18] On the other hand, the wiki model seems to encourage the creation of abortive book projects that linger indefinitely without being improved or deleted, and it can be extremely hard for a visitor to the site to find any high-quality, completed books. Wales says, "It's still a young project. I would consider it to be mission accomplished when we could point and say, 'Well, you could teach yourself, or someone could teach you using these materials, (anything) from the kindergarten to the university level.'" I recently carried out a non-scientific attempt to survey the best books on Wikibooks. My sample, taken from the adult English-language site, consisted of all the books whose level of development was listed as "comprehensive text" (the highest level), plus all those that had been voted book of the month at some point, plus a list of four books suggested by a Wikibooks user with whom I happened to start up a dialog on Slashdot. This made a total of 20 books.[19] Of these: 11 were not really books, ranging in length from 6 to 50 pages. One was marked with a copyright violation banner. Four or five were books that seemed to have been written entirely outside of Wikibooks, dumped into Wikibooks wholesale, and never really edited much by Wikibooks users. Only three or four were complete books that appeared to have been created and written through Wikibooks itself. Despite Wales' high hopes for revolutionizing education, I don't think the traditional textbook publishers are shaking in their boots yet. One of the strongest areas of activity on Wikibooks actually seems to be the production of guides to computer games, a genre that accounted for five of the 20 books in my sample (counted in the "not really books" category due to their short lengths). Maybe I'm being unfair. Although Wikibooks has existed for two and a half years, some of its users say that it was neglected for a long time by the Wikimedia Foundation's founders, and that activity has only really started to build up within the last six months. Even so, I think there are some characteristics encoded deep in Wikibooks' DNA that will keep it from having much of an impact on the world of formal education. One of the things teachers want most of all in a text is authority and reliability, and those are fundamental areas of weakness in the whole wiki approach. Another problem is the books' lack of availability in print. For better or for worse, college professors and K-12 school districts are almost never willing to consider a book that can't be ordered wholesale from a print publisher. Although a few college professors are willing to adopt a digital-only book and leave it up to their students to download it and print it out on their own, very few books on the Wikibooks site offer versions that are actually formatted appropriately for convenient do-it-yourself printing. There is a fundamental problem here, since wiki software is oriented toward HTML output, but HTML isn't a very printer-friendly format. And finally, the wiki method doesn't seem to be a good match to the way textbooks are actually written: by teachers. A teacher typically decides to write a textbook because he isn't happy with the books that are available and thinks he can do better. The openness and inclusivity of the wiki method are diametrically opposed to the ability of a single author to express his own vision. making contactWriting is all about making contact between an author and a reader, and this is currently one of the biggest problems for free books. What was really subversive and exciting about the World Wide Web was that it took control away from publishers, changing the definition of "page" from something produced in a factory to something you could create yourself, without asking for permission. Along with that freedom came the problem for the reader of how to find anything worthwhile on the Web, where there was no publisher to filter out the garbage. Readers looking for free books online are likely to visit relatively popular sites, which right now include Lulu and Wikibooks. The problem is that on Lulu they'll wade through crank literature such as "Fixing Einstein's Physics," while on Wikibooks they'll be sorting through such gems as "How To Build A Pykrete Bong." My own attempt to help solve this problem for free books is my web site ,[5] which catalogs free books and accepts user-submitted reviews. The new site [12] focuses on mirroring a smaller and more carefully vetted selection of book, and provides editorial blurbs and an opportunity for users to submit reviews. Textbookrevolution's creator Jason Turgeon writes, "Traditional textbook publishers are insane. They're looking at the size of the US market for textbooks, which is no longer growing, trying to figure out how to keep their revenue growing and satisfy shareholders. And their solution isn't to find new markets, to reach out to developing nations, or to cut development and distribution costs by using the new technologies that are available to all of us. Instead, their solution has been to raise prices every year and to try to kill off the used book market with gimmicks and pointless new editions. But their prices are getting so high that they're actually shooting themselves in the foot --- no one outside of the developed world can afford their product at all, and fewer and fewer of those who can pay are willing to. I can feel the change in the air. Students, teachers, and parents are all fed up. Sites like mine are just the beginning. Sooner or later, something is going to click into place and the market is going to correct itself." Another recent attempt to connect readers to books has been the Google Book Search program (formerly known as Google Print). This interface between the freewheeling culture of Google and the staid world of print publishing has so far been about as successful as attempts to mate a Klingon[20] with a Ferengi[21]. The idea was that Google would index printed books in the same way that it indexes web pages, without allowing web surfers to download and read a whole book. Some of the books would be scanned from four large university and public libraries, while a second program would scan in books that publishers submitted in hopes that Google hits would drive sales. The scans of library collections are on an opt-out basis for publishers, rather than opt-in, which elicited howls of protest and a copyright infringement lawsuit. I originally thought that the Google program might become an important part of the free book infrastructure. The only requirements were that your book have an ISBN, and that you submit a printed copy to Google. (The latter requirement has since been eliminated, and publishers can simply upload PDFs.) I signed up as a publisher, and at first it looked promising. In my account, I chose to make all of my books 100% browsable. (Presumably most publishers of non-free books have been setting much lower values.) When I tested the system by doing an ordinary Google search on text from one of my books, it showed me the page in the scanned book on which the text occurred, gave me the ability to flip through the book page by page, and showed me an option to buy a copy. Then the lawsuit hit, and Google began to backpedal. Results from books were no longer shown in ordinary Google searches, but only in searches on print., and since very few people ever do a search on print., the potential for attracting readers was greatly reduced. Then, in an attempt to convince publishers and authors that this wasn't all about pirating their books, Google changed the name to Google Book Search, and the URL to books.. Then searches began to show less and less of my books, even though my account was still set at 100% browsable. First it would only show a few pages, then only one page, until finally, right now, if you do this search, you're allowed to view a few lines of text, with the rest of the page obscured by a scary notice: "Restricted Page. This page is unavailable for viewing." The whole experience makes the reader feel like a naughty ten-year-old boy trying to get a glimpse of the neighbor lady undressing through a gap in her curtains, and given the quality of the experience, it's hard to imagine that Google Book Search will ever build a viable pool of users. connecting the dotsNow that an infrastructure is being built for free books, part of the challenge will be to get people to start using it, and using all the pieces together. Most people doing free textbooks aren't using Lulu or Wikibooks. Most people using Lulu aren't doing free books. Nobody on Wikibooks seems to be using Lulu. There's also a need to fix or throw away some of the failures, such as Google Book Search and the accumulated cruft of failed books on Wikibooks. Picking winners and losers, however, has never been one of the strengths of the free information movement, and the issues surrounding Google Book Search are being played out by people who have no particular interest in free books. On the reader's side, it doesn't occur to most people looking for reading material that there are over a thousand free books on the web. They might be surprised to learn that quite a few of those books are also available in print, and they probably don't know that they can find them through sites like textbookrevolution and theassayer. Some people reading this article will have bought a printed book in a store that was also free on the web, but not realized it. For example, you can go into a store and buy one of Bruce Eckel's programming books, or a science fiction book from Baen, bring it home, and finish reading the whole thing without ever knowing that it was available for free in digital form. For the authors of those books, it's a good deal --- the digital books are a form of free publicity, and the economics is like the logic of coupons and rebates: the people who have the most money to spend are the ones least likely to use them. But this under-the-radar approach keeps readers and authors from realizing what's going on around them. References[1] "Rip-off 101: Second Edition --- How the Publishing Industry's Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs" >>Link[2] Robert A. Heinlein, "Where To?", Galaxy magazine, written in 1950 and published in February 1952.[3] Ben Crowell, Do Open-Source Books Work? >>Link[4] Ben Crowell, Free Books: A Sneaky Success >>Link[5] >>Link[6] Wikimedia servers >>Link[7] Jason Turgeon, whose web site promoting free books is discussed later in this article, commented after reading an early draft of this article that it really shouldn't really be necessary to pay so much for bandwidth these days. It's true that you can get webhosting for less money than I've been paying, but my earlier experiences with cheaper webhosts had been problematic in terms of reliability. For many authors, it doesn't seem reasonable to take on any new monthly bill for the sake of promoting a free book that isn't generating any revenue. In my own case, I'm running some CPU-intensive web applications, not just serving up static html.[8] Daley and Daley, Organic Chemistry, >>Link[9] Wikimedia Commons >>Link[10] The older OPL license has fallen into disuse, and its creator now urges people to use a Creative Commons license. The GFDL has been criticized for some features that are seen as unfree, such as the provisions for having portions of the text (like dedications) that can't be modified. This has led the Debian project to get rid of all GFDL'd documentation that uses the objectionable options. However, there is a consensus that the GFDL, when used without the cruft, is a free license. My claim that the free-information community has moved toward standardizing on the GFDL and CC-BY-SA is not based on any scientific opinion poll, but simply on my own perception. The use of the GFDL by Wikipedia has been strong message of support for the license. The prevalence of CC-BY-SA can also be judged by the significant number of Wikipedians who have inserted boilerplate language on their user pages saying that their own contributions are dual licensed under the CC-BY-SA as well as the GFDL. The other flavors CC licenses are probably more popular than CC-BY-SA, but I'm just talking about authors who want to use a viral copyleft license of some kind.[11] "Textbook," Wikipedia >>Link[12] >>Link[13] >>Link[14] Travis Tea, Atlanta Nights. "The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts." >>Wikipedia link[15] Richard Fitzpatrick's Lulu site, which links to his university page: >>Link[16] the web site for Tarnoff's course: >>Link[17] en. >>Link[18] Daniel Terdiman, "Wikibooks takes on textbook industry," c|net, September 28, 2005 >>Link[19] Ada Programming, America's Army: Special Forces, Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, Cell Biology, Chinese, Chrono Trigger, Consciousness Studies, Final Fantasy VI, How to Build a Computer, How to solve the Rubik's Cube, Introduction to Sociology, JAGS-2, Knowing Knoppix, Lucid Dreaming, Medal of Honor: Frontline, Qrai, Teaching Assistant in France Survival Guide, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, U.S. History, and UK Constitution and Government.[20] "Klingon," Wikipedia >>Link[21] "Ferengi," Wikipedia >>Linkseries | Light and Matter | The Assayer ................
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