Myths and misunderstandings about open textbooks

[Judy Baker]

At their upcoming presentation at the 2009 Open Educational Resources Conference in August at Vancouver, British Columbia, Dr. Barbara Illowsky and Jacky Hood will discuss and dispel common myths surrounding open textbooks. These myths relate to business models and product quality, and Barbara and Jacky will discuss how in order to abolish these myths, multiple viable business models are required, including modest support pricing, high volume with low prices, advertising, grant funding, and donations. The ways in which the use of open textbooks can in fact benefit campus bookstores will also be discussed.

Watch a display of tweets about common open textbook myths.

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[Barbara Illowsky]

Thanks for setting this up! By George, I think I've got it!

[Jacky Hood]

Myth One: Authors never receive monetary compensation for open textbooks.

[Jacky Hood]

Myth Two: All open textbooks are ‘crowd-sourced’, i.e., created by anonymous amateurs.

[Jacky Hood]

Myth Three: Campus bookstores suffer from the use of open textbooks.

[Cable Green]

bookstores - important to be aware of OER - it is a threat - but it's coming

Flat World - time to re-look at the textbook publishing model: used book market forced the commercial publishers to shorten the version time - raises prices

[Cable Green]

bookstores... leverage location / point of presense -- and existing personal relationships and technical integrations with admin systems

[David Lippman]

So I'm curious - does anyone have any good tips for discussing open texts with a bookstore? My college's bookstore is very hesitant to order anything if they don't have return privileges. Even running off loose copies through our print shop, they will currently charge back to the department for any unsold copies.

[Jacky Hood]

Myth Four: Modifications to textbooks damage the authors’ credibility.

[Lila Bailey]

if someone changes it, i feel like i should have say in it but if it's open and they can make any changes they want
CC BY has a non-endorsement clause, requires you to say when changes are made
Can we be sure that people will follow the license?
A regularly published textbook can be mis-used, authors are not responsible for how it's used
But you can also have a permanent version that is pointed back to
Reputations of authors can be increased - can confer prestige on the author
Author can re-engage - opportunity to stay involved
Holds the author to a higher standard but it's not just the author's responsibility to keep up to date with all comments and potential edits
You can get a sense of who the reliable editors are
Many different kinds of open textbooks - some are wikis where no author is necessarily credited to anyone
fixture of academic process that things are judged, this just makes it more available for that to happen - allows the whole community to "true things up" rather than just the author
Open textbooks are even more vetted - can say this has been used in 50 countries, translated into 20 languages - this is even better for the author's portfolio
Needs to be room for an academic process that is slower (than twitter etc. versioning of an open textbooks gives you the opportunity to do this)

[Jacky Hood]

Myth Five: Open textbooks are low quality or out-of-date with expired copyrights.

[Jacky Hood]

Myth Six: Publishing companies are the enemies of open textbooks.

[Eric Frank]

yes - there are models for authors to earn royalties. A more profound question: is royalties even the issue, or is it collaborative models that don't rely on royalties to generate 'mediated learning resources" vs complete textbooks? More discussed and not captured yet.