Re: $64 million for out-of-date and educationally generic textbooks?

Frank Lowney, October 23, 2011

Of course the commercial interests are hard at work trying to obfuscate these facts. For example, they will tell us how much they spend on (unnecessary) copyright clearance in the hope of scaring us off. The antidote is to reflect on just how much of a textbook is copyrightable. Facts and ideas are not copyrightable. Only the unique expression of an idea can be copyrighted.

So why are we talking about $5 printed textbooks?

Why not $1 (or less) digital eBooks? Since free eReaders capable of handling EPUB are available on just about every computing device I can think of, eBooks are more cost-effective and more pedagogically useful than pBooks.

What if 10% of the fourth grade teachers in English speaking countries around the world would use the Internet to collaborate in the production of two or three fourth grade science textbooks? How would they compare to what commercial publishers have to offer?
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