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$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)Posted Feb 3, 2006 2:55 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)In reply to: $100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) by sbergman27 Parent article: $100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet)
Perhaps in the near future, publishers of textbooks might offer schools a site license for PDF versions of their books, which would be then given to their students to use for the course of the class. Now, without some nasty draconian DRM, I don't know how there would be *actual* protection preventing these documents from being copied to others, or even from being kept by the students after the class is long over, but that could be mitigated by the legal requirements that the schools must abide by as part of the contract with the publishers, as well as audits performed by the schools and their districts, which must be public (at least in the US). Most schools would accept the site agreements and then pay the new fees when new editions are released.
To me, it just seems a matter of the publishers adjusting their pricing models and contracts, and the schools would benefit in several ways (not having to buy new books just because they become worn, lost, or damaged, book storage, running out of books, etc.). I haven't heard of any initiatives like this yet, but I don't think it would be hard to envision this as the future arrangement.
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$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) Posted Feb 3, 2006 3:30 UTC (Fri) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link] Except that, as I understand it, the laptops will be the property of the kids not the school. I think that was planned to be part of the purchase agreement.
$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) Posted Feb 3, 2006 6:50 UTC (Fri) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link] The free high school science texts project in Cape Town is writing physics, chemistry, biology, and math textbooks under the GNU Free Documentation License (a terrible license by free software standards, but free in many ways and much better than most book licenses).
$100 Laptop: Great for the world, great for Linux (ZDNet) Posted Feb 3, 2006 11:37 UTC (Fri) by soundray (subscriber, #688) [Link] Remember, these laptops come with very limited mass storage -- no hard disk drives. There is no need for publishers to fear massive proliferation of restrictively licensed works via these laptops alone. Given the incredibly high profile of this project, I could easily see the publicity benefit alone outweighing the risk for publishers.
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