From Profs. Lydia Loren and Joe Miller (both of Lewis & Clark Law School), a pay-what-you-feel casebook on intellectual property. According to Prof. Loren: Joe Miller and I have written a new IP Survey book and we are looking for some “beta testers” to try it out next semester. The book is entirely in digital […]
“It” is the filthy lucre of publishing royalties. Well, I exaggerate: Here’s yet another example of a professor bucking the publishing system and getting materials out there, for free. Noel Capon, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, is releasing “Managing Marketing in the 21st Century” Radiohead-style: students (or I suppose, anyone) pay what […]
Tagged open access, textbooksAnother article about Professor R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, in today’s New York Times. McAfee is giving away his economics textbook and letting students download it as a PDF or get it micro-printed from Lulu or Flat World Knowledge. He also scoffs at the idea that textbooks can ever be fully […]
Tagged eLangdell, open access, textbooksYesterday Creative Commons announced a partnership with the CK-12 Foundation‘s Flexbook, “a free and open source textbook platform where one can build and edit collaborative textbooks.” The Commonwealth of Virginia announced a partnership with CK-12 to build an open physics flexbook for all of Virginia. Interestingly, the Foundation chose the Creative Commons BY-SA (attribution + […]
Last week’s LA Times reported on vigilante open-source textbook publishing. Economist R. Preston McAfee was so fed up with “idiotic books that are starting to break $200” that he turned down $100K for his textbook and decided to let it go Free. “I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” he is […]
Tagged casebooks, ebooks, etexts, project: eLangdell, textbooksLooks like someone in the publishing industry’s PR machine has been hard at work peddling this story: Textbooks, free and illegal, online: Use of pirated works hurting publishers I’m sure that piracy is cutting into sales, but as is typical, the story lacks any quantitative data substantiating its overall alarmist tone. As far as eLangdell […]
(Cross posted at Law School Innovation) Harvard Law School’s faculty unanimously last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free. The school’s announcement, issued today, notes that Harvard is the first law schol to make this commitment to open access. (Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences had also voted unanimously for […]
I made a presentation and had a great discussion with the Information Futures group, an association of library and information scientists. The main points of my presentation: From my experience in running a legal aid website for the general public, education is different than just putting information out there. A course textbook is a curated […]
According to the New York Times’ The Caucus blog, Barack Obama was speaking with financially struggling students in in Edinburg, Texas, and had this surprising bit of advice: “Books are a big scam” he said. Say what? There were some slightly startled chuckles from the students. “I taught law at the University of Chicago for […]
Lewis Hyde outlined the “Encroachment on the Commons” now underway in the academy. A basic dilemma facing educational fair use is that it’s stuck between too much specificity (cutting out potentially fair uses) and too much vagueness (leading teachers to avoid risk by stopping far short of fair use). To the extent that specific guidelines […]
