eTextBooks (for kids)

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 09:47:15AM +0300, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Dov Grobgeld wrote:
>
>> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 09:40:58 +0300
>> From: Dov Grobgeld <dov.grobgeld at gmail.com>
>> To: Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos.co.il>
>> Cc: ILUG <linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il>
>> Subject: Re: eTextBooks (for kids)
>>
>> That argument is like the arguments against writing free software because it
>> will put the software vendors out of business. It is clear that the interest
>
> No, it's a very different argument. The correct analogy here is music. 
> The content market is not the same as the sotware market. There is a free 
> software market, but there is no free content market. And the main reason 
> is that there is a revenue model for free software, but no revenue model  
> for free content.

I don't quite agree with you:

Content of text books requires maintinance. As the above subthread
shows, the cost of maintinance of a paper text-book is high due to the
high cost of distribution. With eBooks the economy is different.

Furthermore, like free software and unlike music, content is reuasble:
next year's teext book is made of some modifications to this year's text
book. This is nowhere near the ampunt of reusability that exists in
software, but still it is better than the state of afairs in the music
business.

If anybody doesn't know where to start, I suspect that the obvious
incubator would be Wikibooks:
http://he.wikibooks.org/
http://en.wikibooks.org/

I'm not sure about the toolchain used to convert those to eBooks . A
quick search only got me
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_Wikibooks/The_Wikibooks_Reader/Printing_A_Wikibook
But I suppose that if there's some demand, a conversion should be simple
to arange (if it does not already exist).

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