eTextBooks (for kids)

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 10:37:18 Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> 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.

I think your insight that music is not as reusable as software and textbooks, 
is very good. Some old music (from the 50's/60's, or even earlier) is still 
popular as is and even has still been selling pretty well. Naturally, Music 
can be remixed, sampled, etc. but it's less critical than code rot, or 
"knowledge rot" - the fact that textbooks need to be updated.

> 
> 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).
> 

There's a MediaWiki extension to convert MediaWiki pages to DocBook/XML:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/DocBook_XML_export

You can also probably convert several MW pages using (a probably hacky) script 
into a .chm book, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help

And there are other possible hacks and tweaks.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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