Greetings Economists, Thanks for bringing this up Tavis. Something I've wanted to see discussed for quite awhile. In my view an important topic for the left to develop some practice in. So your initiative is welcome from my point of view entirely. I think there are some questions of course to pose. Where Tavis writes,
Tavis, Open-source publications can be malleable. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) (www.linuxdoc.org) is a series of documents -- of highly variable quality -- that help users negotiate the Linux operating system and related software. Doyle, Why such methods haven't migrated to publishing textbooks already seems a highly practical point to make here. I think this requires a close economic examination of the issues that arise. The essay that Bill Lear forwarded on his list of URL resources observes the problems with textbook publishing through open source. It is not just a matter of document publishing in Open Source being malleable. To quote from that essay; http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/article.html " 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. " Doyle, A text book is a book as opposed to computer software and web based applications. Are we writing for the web or are we writing for print? The Print industry was designed to fend off pirating texts and that might explain why Open Source publishing has been difficult. One can publish to the web and print from there of course, but I don't think you are advocating strictly that. You bring up the WIKI community as an example which is an on-line community process. So let's just see the conflict between a book and a web site. Jakob Nielsen writes about reading the web (Designing Web Usability, page 101) "Keep your Texts Short" "Research has shown that reading from computer screens is about 25 percent slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know about this human-factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from comput6er screens. Therefore, you should write 50 percent less text--because it's not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good. We also know that users don't like to scroll: one more reason to keep pages short." Doyle, I think clarifying whether or not something is a book or web based publication has a great deal to do with the success or failure of a text book open source project. I do want to see something like this happen. I think the collaborative process can be explored on the left in a very positive way. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
