Comments on: How to turn Wikipedia articles into e-books

By: Mark Phifer

Mark Phifer — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:15:49 +0000

Very useful indeed and it seems to be fun creating your own book. This makes it easy for you to get access to important files that you saved and use it on projects that you might be working on. Instead of searching all the time, this e-book export feature permits you too arrange files for easy search and access.

By: Dan Eldridge

Dan Eldridge — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:49:45 +0000

… it’s open source *competitor,* I meant to write.

By: Dan Eldridge

Dan Eldridge — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:48:36 +0000

Thanks Frank – I hadn’t heard about this case. Incidentally, since you work in the field, I’m curious to know if you’ve ever had an opportunity to compare a traditionally printed textbook with what would be considered its open source competition. If so, I’d be curious to know you opinion about how similar (or dissimilar, if that’s the case) the two sets of content appear.

In the Boundless case, for instance, it seems that the plaintiff is essentially accusing Boundless of stealing its content and repackaging it. What are your thoughts on that? Are the open source texts really that blatantly similar?

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:25:33 +0000

“(Let’s just hope our cash-strapped university students don’t start replacing their overpriced textbooks with little assortments of error-filled Wikipedia posts!)”

There’s an interesting startup called Boundless that’s already doing this. Commercial publishers have already filed a suit against them claiming that the sequence of presentation is copyright-able. See: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-major-publishers-sue-open-education-textbook-start-up/35994

I guess they’d be OK with a history book that starts at the present and works backward. Or maybe not.