Deep Currents

How necessary is it that a book have one author? There’s an interesting experiment underway called Connexions that testing the collaborative editing model of production on textbooks. Authors publish their work on the site in small modules, each of which carries a Creative Commons license that allows modification and republishing provided that the original author is given credit. The result is a library where the atomic unit can be as small as a paragraph, providing students and teachers with the ability to mix and match explanations of topics from a range of sources to fit their needs and taste. (The Times article claims this is a shift from the model used by MIT’s OpenCourseWare, though it’s not clear how, given that OCW also uses a license that allows sharing and modification.) This is still a nascent project that has gathered its largest collections in statistics and electrical engineering, areas with a greater need to update material than in the social sciences, but it is easy to imagine how the model could spread. The attraction for authors is simple–the editing process is shorter and the potential profits are often minimal to begin with:

“If I had finished my own book, I would have finished a couple years ago,” [Professor Baraniuk] said. “It would have taken five years. It would have spent five years in print and sold 2,000 copies.” Instead, he said, he posted it on the Web site and there have been 2.8 million page views of his textbook, “Signals and Systems,” including a translation into Spanish.

Written: September 16th, 2008