Major textbook publishers sue open-education textbook start-up
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Apr 2012 17:52 UTC
Legal Rage-inducing and despicable. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, three major textbook publishers, Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education, are suing a small startup company that produces open and free alternative textbooks. This startup, Boundless Learning, builds textbooks using creative commons licensed and otherwise freely available material - and this poses a threat to the three large textbook publishers. So, what do you do when you feel threatened? Well, file a copyright infringement lawsuit, of course.
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Comment by zhuravlik
by zhuravlik on Sun 8th Apr 2012 07:02 UTC
zhuravlik
Member since:
2009-08-24

If I open a Wikipedia article, there's very strong possibility that this article cites one of the major textbooks on subject printed by a major publisher.

There's also a possibility that this article borrows the key ideas and sometimes even an artistic spirit from the original book.

And this is not a bad thing, because sometimes there's no another good way to describe things. Also, collecting the best ideas from the best books in one place is even better.

But trying to replace the original books with the books based on articles based on ideas borrowed from the original books is a really strange thing to do.

I think that the money spent to such work instead should be directed to the founding of the new publishing house which provides both printed books and CC-licensed eBooks on the same subject. No-one will disregard good printed books, even if he has their free electronic copies.

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