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Originally Posted by Danny Fekete
I'm not arguing about writing being romantic or different than other pursuits, and though (romantically) I do feel that education and proliferation of knowledge ought to exist outside of a capitalistic framework, it's not pertinent to the argument I'm trying to present.
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I'm not sure it's
possible for it to exist outside of a capitalistic framework. People will create the content, and need to be compensated, and others will manufacture and distribute it, and need to be compensated. Where does the money come from, and how does it get distributed?
Quote:
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Just the opposite: knowledge generation is moving away from individual authorship to community authorship. Textbook authorship in the way that you used it to make a living is on its way out, as Baraniuk and others in the open education field have demonstrated very clearly. It's not going to be a way to make a living much longer, and I think romance lies in insisting that it is---romance, and the much more dangerous conservatism of insisting that alternate publishing models are immoral. I appreciate that this is not exclusively (or mostly) the tack that you've been taking, but an unawareness of where things are moving when defending an earlier ideal of publishing puts you in a position to unreasonably curtail knowledge access and (in accordance with community-based authorship and education) democracy.
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And "community authorship" leads you into the morass that Wikipedia sometimes becomes. I'll use Wikipedia (and do daily), but with distinct reservations and grains of salt, depending upon the topic, because I don't assume that the view most commonly held is correct, nor that facts can be determined by committee.
But you might benefit by focusing your attention on the demand side of the equation, not the supply side. Remember, textbook publishers aren't really selling to you as the student. Yes, you have to buy them, but what texts you buy is determined by the school you attend, and the courses you take. You buy the books required for that class.
You don't get to decide which to use.
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Dennis