Gary Lawrence Murphy is writing about Open Content on Prentice Hall - the series that Prentice Hall are bringing out under the Open Publication License.
Gary refers to his earlier experiences trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Macmillan to adopt an Open Content approach to a project he was driving. The issues weren’t just with the publishers - authors had problems with a licence that wasn’t either 100% free or standard, and the publication process fell over in the middle - authors and printers were ready for XML-based document manipulation and output, but the editors in the middle were still using “their MsWord-based font-painters”
He ends with a vision for the future
XML-based publishing where the manuscript does not really exist, where it’s a collection of sections and variations, indexed, threaded and exported for books [...] all of it online updated on the fly by the community who uses it. The art of the author/editor would be one of filtering, pulling what they need from the knowledge base to create other titles as well, semantically linking it all through topic-maps …
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January 28th, 2003 at 3:15 pm
Just a clarification that while Macmillian, like Prentice-Hall, would not go for the full Open Content License (elder to the FSF Free Document License, but same basic idea) they were very open to the Open Publishing License “with both options” (meaning no other publisher can print a book for competitive sale without permission, and while anyone can add to it, no one can change the content without permission; corrections must be annotations). It took many iterations of my explaining just why I wanted people to be able to freely distribute the work, but they clicked immediately to allowing the community to amend it.
The rejection from the opensource community is what surprised me. Today, given a celebrity endorsement, and even though many OPL books have since hit the stands without making headlines, this particular event makes the NYTimes; three years ago, way ahead of our peers, we received nothing but flak and outright rejection because we were not allowing the publisher any room to recoup the (considerable) expenses in publishing the book. Even the Sourceforge had to take several iterations of my explanations to accept the OPL as an “open source” sufficient to allow hosting on their free server.
Personally, and just between you and me, I believe this had more to do with the dot-bubble egotism of overpaid but socially marginalized geeks being granted permission to bully a massive corporation like Pearson; it had little or nothing to do with our license. No one thought twice about the restrictive licenses of ORA books because “Tim was small business who supported us” (which is true).
Back then, geeks thought they could demand anything and get it, whereas today, post dot-bomb, they are all so grateful that a publisher would even consider publishing their work, they would accept anything. That Perens has a press-agent who can ‘leak’ this ‘revolution’ to the NYTimes is really like that bogus march at the Linux Expo to ‘demand’ government rejection of proprietary code, it’s just a publicity grab in hopes that someone, anyone, will pay attention again, like in the good old bubble days, and maybe even buy his book.
February 4th, 2003 at 3:06 am
I’m going to amend myself here: When I said the author/editor would be filtering, that is not my current thinking: Instead, it’s the aggregate effects of many authors who post-production filter the content, causing the better content to rise in the ratings (as in DayPop) leaving the author to thread the beads into a new work.
Keep in mind this is probably not viable for fiction, but only for textbooks and trade tech “recipe” books. In fact, cooking trade books have been using this technique for years.