Book People Archive

Re: OCW as System of Electronic Books

I've spoken with MIT Professor Hal Abelson about
this.  He has already placed his works on the web,
including the textbook, "Structure and Interpretation
of Computer Programs," loved by programming students 
for many years.  MIT has set up a team to help
develop the courseware and courses.  Most likely
copyright will remain as it is now, in the hands
of the professors or creators of the work, but that
will not prevent its being published freely on the
web for all to read.  But the whole project is
only in the early development stage now.  

MIT is also known for its Shakespeare site, but I don't
know what further developments will happen there.

I discussed with Abelson the need for open courseware
and he assured me that it would all be "open source"
or basically under the GPL except that like the
BSD or X Windows license MIT would probably require
attaching its name to the software it develops.

An interesting point is how to publish some work
on the web openly and at the same time convince a
paper book publisher to print it and sell it and
make money.  Even O'Reilly and Associates has
not quite figured out how to make money on the
print books that way.  However, Abelson tells me
he has discussed the project with MIT Press, so
we will have to be patient and see how this
grand experiment works out.

One implication for our work in publishing e-texts
would be to consider how to make deep hyperlinks 
directly into the texts, for the purpose of aiding
the courseware that can refer to them.  We might
for example include the page numbers of the paper
print text in the e-text as anchors, as well as
anchors for other structural elements such as
chapters and so on.  Since the MIT project will
take advantage of Dublin Core metadata, we might
consider adding that to our e-texts and follow
whatever form they decide to use for Dublin Core.

In any case, Franklin, you are right to call it
to our attention.  This project is a great victory
for those of us who treasure online books.

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 02:12:50PM -0700, Franklin Wayne Poley wrote:
> Have those with E-book interests given any thought to the link between
> E-book development and MIT's new OCW program? It seems likely to me that
> OCW would use online E-books and that those books might even evolve into
> courses by autoinstruction.
> FWP