Open Source Books

Discussion: Differences between Free Software and Books

All excerpts are from the very extensive comments field discussing the book Decoding Liberation. The discussion is continued here

David Berry:

"I begin to wonder if the whole FLOSS arguments are being uncritically applied to everything else. Academic texts are not software and whilst I would not want to see copyright extended to prevent scholars or students from undertaking their research, I think a much more serious threat to academic work comes from the digitalization of texts (See the excellent book “Double Fold” by Nicolson Baker) and of course, then we have the problems of digital rights management to contend with too.

Books have served academic research very well over the centuries and copyright as part of the public/private bargain has also worked pretty well. In the digital age misunderstandings, technological changes, greed and some short-sighted measures are making the whole digital world very difficult for scholars. However, we need to keep our eye fixed on what it is that we are doing when we are teaching, and not get distracted by a kind of digitalist quanitification argument - namely that unless we can all collect hugh textual archives on our harddrives we are somehow unable to learn. Students *should* be going to libraries, should be taking out books, and most of all *should* be reading them… otherwise the libraries will close… and that will be a much greater threat to academic work than not being able to copy whole texts..."

Biella Coleman:

"Of course they can’t be collapsed because they are different genres that require different sorts of licensing schemes and the economics of them are also quite distinct. This is why I advocate for copyright for books, although I think a more limited term is still appropriate.

As per cost: it matters, not due to Free Software-like arguments, but because of access, plain and simple. My university is able to afford a gabillion books no problem because it is relatively wealthy, so when I look for a book, it will most probably be there.

Most universities south of the US border can’t afford books at these prices. When a book is 95 dollars, then the University of Guyana’s of the world just don’t have funds for these books and even smaller universities in the states can’t either. And while there is a good Interlibrary Loan System in the US, it is not international.

Just like cost matters with medical drugs, it matters with books but not because of free speech ala RMS arguments but because it is a matter of justice and fairness when it comes to having access to education and medical services.

And yes students can photocopy chapters but there are limits to this in the US and especially Canada (and Canada has very restrictive fair use policies, which at the University of Alberta was announced on flyers that were splattered all over the university walls. You are not supposed to photocopy more than a certain percentage of a book and official readers are quite pricey because of licensing fees).

And while copyright and patents don’t totally determine the cost of things like books and drugs, they play a role too and so we need to think about these regimes when discussing questions of cost and access."

Karl Fogel:

"Both monetary cost and freedom matter, independently of each other. Biella already pointed out why price matters.

Freedom matters because quoting isn’t the only thing one might want to do with a text: one might also want to make derivative works based on it. For example, translations! This is not a merely theoretical point: niche books and texts that are released under free licenses really *do* get translated by volunteers, see here and here, just to pick two off the top of my head.

I offer translation as the first example only because it is most familiar. There are many other things one might not think of right away, if one is used to regarding books as static objects. What if I like someone’s book, but don’t like their writing style? Why shouldn’t I just release a re-edited version of it? What if I see that it’s missing obvious references — why shouldn’t I just add them? If an argument is ill-made or incomplete, why should a reader not take matters into her own hands?

(Not referring to Chopra and Dexter’s book specifically, of course. I haven’t read it; I’d like to, but probably won’t because it costs $90.)

And just to be clear: this isn’t about attribution, but about accurately-attributed copying and derivation. Of course accurate attribution should be required, by law if necessary, though it’s worth noting that attribution problems has so far not been an issue in the free / open source world, and that’s true for the documentation as well as the software. You can have complete freedom to modify others’ works without that implying the right to steal credit.

David, when you say the freedoms to quote and critique are not infringed, that is a very impoverished notion of “freedom” I think. In the age of the Internet, of a world-wide copying and editing network, we can do much, much better.

Adam, when you say that a publisher offers “distribution, publicity, endorsement”, what you’re essentially saying is that it is appropriate for the *distribution* function to be unified with the *endorsement* function. Isn’t that a bit odd? After all, newspapers prohibit, say, their music critics from receiving payments from the performers they review. Why do we consider it a good system, that the same people who recommend the books (that’s what publicity and endorsement are) are the ones who stand to make more money if the books sell well. If anything, it would make more sense to argue for those to be separate functions. Marketing is an arms race: I understand how it might be to Chopra and Dexter’s advantage to purchase some more ammunition (at the expense of their readers’ freedoms), but the overall arms race dynamic is not conducive to objective evaluation nor creative reuse. What does a publisher offer the public that a word-of-mouth network or reviews site couldn’t offer as well or better?

Peer review? Well, why not do peer review the way we do it in the free software world: *post*-publication.

The same freedoms that are important for software are important for all creative works. The “freedom to fork” is the ultimate peer review mechanism, and should apply to all bit patterns, not just the ones interpretable as running code by machines. Where we must regulate, we should do so only to protect truly scarce resources (i.e., attribution), not artificially scarce resources (the works themselves).

I’m not saying Chopra and Dexter did something morally objectionable here, by the way. I do worry that they may have fatally compromised their book: it will probably find fewer readers this way, and have a shorter active life (in part because readers are not free to keep it up-to-date, and Chopra and Dexter will not have complete freedom to do so either, since the publisher controls release dates now). At $90, I certainly wouldn’t assign it in a class.

FWIW, I released a book about free software under a free license, and I know of at least three places where it’s being used as a classroom text now. The fact that the instructors can just point the students to a URL may have had something to do with this. Also, the text is searchable; that might help. Also, quoting from it is easy, because the text is electronic and online as well as in print and in bookstores. Also, I can keep updating it incrementally, without worrying about when someone might decide to publish a particular snapshot (anyone is free to do so whenever they want). I have volunteer translators translating it into (at last count) eleven languages. I have seen people take the book and transform it into other non-book forms that I don’t even quite understand myself (a “process description” website, in one case).

Do you see what a richer world this is than static content stuck between two covers, bound to a publishing schedule based on batching large quantities of dead tree pulp for expensive, centralized print runs?

I worry that lack of these dynamics will be harmful to Chopra’s and Dexter’s book, and therefore to them. Even if I could afford the book, it would start out with a strike against it from my point of view: the authors are writing (apparently with approval) about free software, but don’t think highly, or perhaps broadly, enough of it to apply the same principles to their own work. So why should a reader take them seriously?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I know why *I* should take them seriously: because they come recommended by Biella, whose judgment I trust. (There’s an endorsing authority unconnected to distribution, by the way.) But for other readers, whose principle knowledge of the work is its own summary, the license terms should set off an alarm."

Dave Berry:

"Karl, your arguments seem to lack a political economy. Computers to read all these digital texts are expensive, as are the networks to support them, electricity to run them, schools to train the readers and so on. Books are cheap, are simple to use and don’t need continual upgrades and mainainence. If I were keen to help spread literacy in the South, I think part of the strategy could be to buy up lots of second-hand books and create vast new libraries scattered around these countries. In fact, I think that would be a good idea in the North too.

I do not think that we should be using books just because they are ‘free’. I think much more important is the value of the ideas and arguments contained within them. I also see nothing wrong with ’static’ content. In fact I am rather glad that, say, my copy of Marx’s Capital or Plato’s Republic are not morphing whilst I teach a class, and more that the ideas they contain remain historically anchored and the more interesting for it."

Karl Fogel:

"If being in book form adds value, then charge for that form. There’s nothing inherently un-economic about printing books whose content is freely available. I mean, my publisher is doing it. Nowhere was I arguing against books as physical objects, and if having content in that physical form is valuable, then there will be a market for that.

If you want to teach a course on the text Marx wrote, use that text. The way you speak of it, it’s like the text is a single physical object, such that if someone changes it, then it must be changed for all the readers. But it’s not like that! If I change *my* copy of Marx, your copy is unaffected. Of course any group reading situation needs to address issues of which versions of a text they’re going to use (Bible study groups have been addressing this for years).

If you want stable content, by all means, have stable content. But why should your need for stable content interfere with someone else’s freedom to change their copy of something? If you don’t want to read that copy, then don’t read it! It’s not an either-or proposition. Dynamic content is a *superset* of static content, not its opposite.

I do not understand how you can have ‘libre’ freedom without ‘free as in beer’ freedom. While the latter does not necessarily imply the former, the former always implies the latter. If everyone can share X freely with others, than the cost will always be driven down to zero (hence X will have both freedoms); if people cannot so share, then X is, by definition, not “libre” free.

Zero-cost doesn’t mean that nobody anywhere is charging for something, it just means there’s no monopoly on setting the price of a non-rivalrous good (and therefore the price will be driven to zero, for those willing to access it in the forums in which it is available at zero cost). The Linux Distros are a bogus example: they weren’t charging for the content, they were charging for the convenience of a certain physical medium with the content nicely packaged on it — exactly as I’m proposing can happen with books."