OLPC and CC Free Content Drive 92
gnujoshua writes "In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site."
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Moglen
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
The not-so-commonly-known goal of OLPC (Score:5, Informative)
The people who stand to benefit from OLPC are popularly seen as becoming computer literate, but the real benefit is the fact that these people do not have access to textbooks.
The OLPC project, with its extremely power-efficient ebook reader mode, attemps to solve the problem of out-of-date textbooks (and no textbooks at all).
For delivery of electronic textbooks, the Worldspace satellite radio service (http://www.worldspace.com/) already offers 128 kbps for the common good. This bandwidth is available to most of the people who stand to benefit from OLPC (except South America) and is a suitable delivery platform for textbooks.
Re:If the content is so good... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If the content is so good... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More important: relevant content by language (Score:3, Informative)
Translation is hard work, and people tend to underestimate how much work it is. My physics textbooks, in English, are free online. Over the years, I've had four or five people contact me, acting extremely enthusiastic about translating them into other languages. One of them translated one chapter into French and then stopped. None of the others actually did any translation. It's the same logic as any open-source software project; although you hear a lot about collaborative development, the bazaar model, etc., actually the vast majority of OSS projects never attract any developers other than the original one.
There are also significant technical obstacles. Producing a high-quality illustrated textbook requires a fairly complicated software setup, and that means that the translators have to be able to reproduce that setup. If you're using proprietary software, you have a problem, because prospective translators aren't going to pay for a copy of it so they can have the privilege of translating a free book for free. If you're using an OSS software stack, then you have the issue that some of the OSS software for this kind of thing is not yet totally mature (e.g., Inkscape is great, but it's still quite new and under heavy development), and some of it is fairly hard to use (e.g., my LaTeX class file for my textbooks runs to 2400 lines of code, plus a few thousand more lines of custom perl scripts).
Re:More important: relevant content by language (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rifters (Score:2, Informative)
How to get paid for things that are free (Score:2, Informative)
1. Immediacy -- You want something now, and you're willing to pay the artist to speed production of a work.
2. Personalization -- You want something tailored to your needs specifically, like an art request, or a piece of Free / Open-Source Software that does what you need it to do.
3. Interpretation -- Or consultation. Like what Red Hat does, in providing paid support for free software.
4. Authenticity -- Like an artist's seal of approval, it lets you know that your recording is of the actual artist's work (and is certified virus-free).
5. Accessibility -- You could pay clearinghouses of data to keep track of all your songs and such for you. At its lowest level it's paid storage, but it could be more than that.
6. Embodiment -- Anyone can download the
7. Patronage -- You know you could download that
8. Findability -- Not everyone knows how to use P2P networks, or even wants to learn how.
Some of us get everything from the P2P networks. But others, who may not object to borrowing CDs or books from their friends, may still find getting copies of people's work anonymously to be somewhat disquieting. Moreover, they may not know how. These are often the people who buy songs from iTunes and Amazon, because $1 seems like a reasonable price to them for the service they receive.
If you think about it, part of the reason that iTunes is so successful in this age of free downloads is because it combines just about everything on the list. You get authentic recordings immediately, which are automatically sorted on your PC or Mac complete with cover art. You can find songs easily on their store, and you get personalized recommendations as to what other songs you might like. Yes, I know iTunes has DRM, but I also know a lot of people don't even think about it. It's true that we need to educate them about it, but I'm just saying it doesn't factor into their decisions.
I found the article extremely relevant, because I hope to make a living as a content creator selling e-books and physical copies thereof. Maybe what we need is more widespread awareness of how to make money? At any rate, the world I see this evolving into is one in which large, "gateway" institutions like TV stations and book publishers are fewer and farther between, but one in which large numbers of individual content creators can make a living off of their work, and have thriving microcommunities built up around each of them.