First the focus is on low-demand academic books and not mainstream commercial publications like Harry Potter. These books are provides under the Creative Commons license and contain rich interactive content like embedded tools that lets the student experiment with the concepts. The capability also provides the capability to create customer books tailored for the instructors specific needs.
My original thought was that this approach did not really address the problem of textbooks in poor and under-develop parts of the world and relied on the Internet to deliver the content. He did go on the highlight the ability to submit the book to a on-demand publisher and have custom books printed and distributed for around $20.00.
All in all, I though the concept was very innovative in that custom books that draw on a broad diverse talent pool for content can be delivered through Internet or traditional books formats.
It's worth the 18 minutes to watch.
1 comment:
Fascinating, John. While I love online content and the ease associated with eBooks and web research, nothing quite replaces the smell and feel of a good book.
However, I am fond of enlarging an online book's diagrams and making the material easy to read and digest.
To think that we could edit books and add our thoughts to them similar to a wiki is intriguing.
Aside from copyright issues, the notion of an online literary book club in which the world shares insights about books sounds rewarding, so long as one can filter the less useful or inaccurate comments.
Interestingly, some publishers offer electronic versions of their publications to under-developed countries for free. We have a similar agreement for a multi-author book that we are publishing on learning in virtual worlds.
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