Timwi wrote:
This is assuming that the larger part of the cost of textbooks is copyright licenses. I would imagine that it is instead the production costs of actual books, and obviously free content won't help that.
I agree that it would be very helpful to us to have a better understanding of the tradeoffs but I also wanted to point out that it's a bit more complex than just copyright license + cost of production here.
Our work is free-as-in-beer but also free-as-in-speech. So the point is not _just_ that a potential producer of paper texts saves on the cost of copyright licensing but also....
1. They don't need to get permission from anyone at all, they can just get started in any small and tiny way they see fit (or in any large and mass-produced way they see fit)
2. There can be many competitors in a market ecosystem of provision of content, rather than a single licensee attempting to capture some monopoly rents
--Jimbo