Great OA page to bookmark
The latest edition of Peter Suber’s Open Access Newsletter includes a roundup of great news from 2008. There’s so much good news to report that he must say up front that he’s been selective, left out some things, and organized what he has into nine categories. And it is a lot to read. But it is so inspiring! It’s just what I needed to feel hopeful for 2009, that the momentum will carry forward.
Several of the items that were news to me were really surprising as well. Top among the surprises was this paragraph under heading 8, Books:
There were new OA textbook publishing initiatives from Flat World Knowledge, the Open University of Israel, and the Community College Open Textbook Project. Florida became the first state in the US to approve an OA textbook program for use in its public schools. The MakeTextbooksAffordable campaign released the Open Textbooks Statement to Make Textbooks Affordable, with signatures of 1,000+ professors from 300+ colleges in all 50 states. StudentPIRGs launched a sign-on “Statement of Intent” for faculty to show their support for OA textbooks. It also published a report recommending OA textbooks and criticizing TA digital textbooks for high prices, hobbling DRM, printing restrictions, and automatic expiration.
Having been a graduate student for the last 2 1/2 years and having used quite a few analog and digital textbooks, I see this industry as *way, way behind the curve* unable to take serious advantage of the digital networked environment. And I’ve heard that the negotiations with publishers to offer their texts in more innovative and more useful ways often fall flat if the publisher can’t be assured of making more money from the new model than he already makes from his existing strategy. Talk about innovator’s dilemma. This sets the stage perfectly for the upstarts who are willing to try new things because they don’t already have preconceived ideas about what they *ought* to be making right now from their existing customers. Have none of these folks read Christensen’s book, Innovator’s Dilemma? Their industry is positioned classically as the losing trajectory in the chart to the left. It shows how new technologies at first fail miserably to meet the needs of a firm’s current customers. Though their performance qualities fall so far below what current customers expect even at the low end of the market, they eventually improve through the process of sustaining innovation until they “break through” into the up-scale markets, directly competing with established firms for the same customers. Christensen documents this pattern in industry after industry. Publishing in general is following the pattern — like a puppy dog. Sad to see, but it’s frustrating as well.
