On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 09:47:15AM +0300, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote: > On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Dov Grobgeld wrote: > >> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 09:40:58 +0300 >> From: Dov Grobgeld <dov.grobg...@gmail.com> >> To: Jonathan Ben Avraham <y...@tkos.co.il> >> Cc: ILUG <linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il> >> Subject: Re: eTextBooks (for kids) >> >> That argument is like the arguments against writing free software because it >> will put the software vendors out of business. It is clear that the interest > > No, it's a very different argument. The correct analogy here is music. > The content market is not the same as the sotware market. There is a free > software market, but there is no free content market. And the main reason > is that there is a revenue model for free software, but no revenue model > for free content.
I don't quite agree with you: Content of text books requires maintinance. As the above subthread shows, the cost of maintinance of a paper text-book is high due to the high cost of distribution. With eBooks the economy is different. Furthermore, like free software and unlike music, content is reuasble: next year's teext book is made of some modifications to this year's text book. This is nowhere near the ampunt of reusability that exists in software, but still it is better than the state of afairs in the music business. If anybody doesn't know where to start, I suspect that the obvious incubator would be Wikibooks: http://he.wikibooks.org/ http://en.wikibooks.org/ I'm not sure about the toolchain used to convert those to eBooks . A quick search only got me http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_Wikibooks/The_Wikibooks_Reader/Printing_A_Wikibook But I suppose that if there's some demand, a conversion should be simple to arange (if it does not already exist). -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best ICQ# 16849754 | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
