[Textbook-l] Introduction - California Open Source Textbook Project

[Sanford Forte]

Thank you Tomasz. It's really hard to understand why this is, but it *is*.
It's a byproduct of the imperfect competition that has been created by
education groups giving over the control of content production to private
enterprise, with *no* public oversight. The public interest has not been
served.

It's a worldwide phenomoenon, even in Poland. Thanks for comfirming, in
Poland, what I know to be true here in the US.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <taw at users.sourceforge.net>
To: <textbook-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 1:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Introduction - California Open Source Textbook
Project


> On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 01:02:01PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Sanford Forte wrote:
> > >This has become an untenable situation, because private publishers
> > >control content. Even GNU will not keep private publishers form
> > >competing with freely available GNU licensed content, and driving up
> > >the prices again.
> >
> > Competition drives *down* prices.  Economics 101.
>
> In this case it doesn't work that way.
>
> Textbook publishing in Poland is horrible too. While making it all private
> really improved quality of textbooks, it certainly didn't managed to drive
> prices down - they're insanely inflated.
>
> Bussiness model for textbook publishing is something like:
> * spring : make a textbook
> * early summer : use any means possible to get as many teachers as
possible
> choose your textbook. teachers don't care much how much it will
> cost and often don't really know either at this point
> * late summer : print like crazy
> * semtember : sell at grossly inflated prices. risk is huge, as you must
>     sell everything in just about two weeks or you will have to wait whole
year
>     with capital being frozen in books (if you manage to sell it next year
at all that is),
>     so you must keep margins very high
>
> * next years : make a new version of textbook, incompatible enough
>     to discourage reuse, but similar enough to keep teacherbase
>
> Eliminating that risk could really drive costs down.
> Easy solutions include having different regions start terms at different
time,
> or having copyrights abolished. As we can't get the former, we may try
> with the latter.
>
> Side note:
> To get teachers in Poland use GNU textbooks, getting certification by
ministry
> of education could help a lot. That's not free but probably not that
expensive
> either (not that I ever tried to get one).
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