econtent generation and sharing laboratory p.i. - shishir k. jha shailesh j. mehta school of...
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eContent Generation and Sharing Laboratory
P.I. - Shishir K. Jha
Shailesh J. Mehta School of ManagementIIT Bombay
Proposal to set up a eContent Generation and Sharing Laboratory
Principal Investigator: Shishir K. Jha, Associate Professor, Shailesh J. Mehta School of
Management, IIT Bombay.
CO-PIs:- 1. Prof. N.S. Gopalakrishanan, Prof., HRD Chair on IPR, CUSAT. 2. Prof. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, Asst. Prof., HSS, IIT Delhi. 3. Lawrence Liang, Legal Practitioner, Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru 4. Sunil Abraham, Director - Advocacy, CIS, Bengaluru. 5. Prof. R M Sonar, Assoc. Prof., SJMSOM, IIT Bombay.
Objectives
Three separate elements of our project:
A) Open Text Book Project For Undergraduate Engineering Students
B) Audio/Video eBook Generation &
C) Addressing the need of sharing content within the context of Indian copyright law.
Justification & Relevance:
Constant, inexpensive and abundant access to all forms of knowledge is a crucial element for the sustainable growth of a developing country like India.
Productive use of unhindered access to knowledge is largely dependent on government policies, an appropriate licensing environment and robust delivery models.
The challenge before a country like India is to ensure that the information revolution, both in its digital and analog forms, is accessible to as many people, across as many strata and regional backgrounds as possible.
Across the world there is a growing momentum for the use of open and flexible copyright licensing mechanisms to help both in the production and distribution of knowledge.
A) OPEN TEXT BOOK DIGITAL CENTER
Pilot project [six months]: Investigators: Vigneswara, Sunil Abraham, R M Sonar and Shishir
Provide inexpensive and good quality Open Text Books for college students.
Open Textbooks are free, online and openly-accessible digital books with chiefly academic content.
Licensed to allow anyone, anywhere, anytime to use, download, customize, or print without expressed permission from the author.
Individuals may reproduce, customize, or distribute the content so long as theauthor is cited appropriately.
Will reduce the cost of education for the underprivileged students and considerably enhance access.
Remove the threat of piracy - if the cost of a textbook is low enough.,
Can be aligned with the basic engineering college curriculum of most Indian institutions.
Combination of better access, good quality and low price has the potential to dramatically alter the educational experience for thousands of college going students
A) OPEN TEXT BOOK DIGITAL CENTER
Pilot project [six months] Two aspects to the project:
(1) Aggregate and archive several existing Open Textbooks [free, public domain or flexibly licensed, on-line, digital texts] through a web-portal which will allow
free-on line access to such text books.
(2) Create completely new Open Textbooks either by approaching new authors or through editing, validating and distributing already available content, in both soft and hard formats.
A) WHY OPEN TEXT BOOKS?
Brief Overview of Traditional Indian Text Book Publishing:
Size of the total Indian publishing market ~ Rs. 10,000 crores 40 to 45 percent of it is English publishing which includes books, newspapers,
magazines, periodicals and academic journals. Growing at the rate of 10 to 15 per cent annually. The Indian text book market Rs. 2,000 crores with imports of around Rs. 80
crores. India also has about 15,000 publishers [compared to 53,000 in USA] in all
languages and boasts of a history of more than 100 years in domestic English publishing with thousands of titles being churned out every year.
India occupies the third position in the world in the number of English publications per year after the USA and UK.
Publishing industry is plagued with following problems: High per unit book costs, low margins, low print volumes Out of 10 books, two will do well, three will be middle of the road and five will fail. A publisher makes 80% of the profits from only 20% of the books sold. Pareto’s principle
Bottlenecks at chiefly three points: a) At the Content generation or the “authoring” [unknown authors?] b) Content validation or “refereeing” [time consuming?]c) Content distribution or “marketing” and “sales” [20:80, Long Tail?]. d) Digital publishing is beginning to alter each of these functions as described below.
Proposed Open Publishing Model [3 dimensions]:A) Aggregation of public domain and alternatively licensed content through a web-
portal: “Freely” available OPEN TEXTBOOKS available at on-line sites: http://www.opentextbook.org/ http://www.textbookrevolution.org/ http://en.wikibooks.org/ http://www.opensourcetext.org/ http://oerconsortium.org/ http://collegeopentextbooks.org/ http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/ http://cnx.org/content/ http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ Books endowed with varying copyright licensing formats allow for the legal use
of such content. Permissions for web-display can always be requested from the authors when required.
Digital link of books on Engineering to be made available on the portal.
A) OPEN TEXT BOOKS & PUBLISHING BOTTLENECKS
Proposed Open Publishing Model [3 dimensions]:
B) Editing and validation of content: Editing & Validation required to transform open/free content into consistent quality. Editing & Validation of individual subjects, will be done by a panel of experts chosen
from leading technical institutions of India: IISc, the NITs, the IITs and several excellent private institutions.
Scholars will be persuaded to write good quality OPEN TEXTBOOKS on specific topics, to be made available to students either for free or at running cost [‘without profit’].
C) Distribution of content: Content distribution will be done in one of the following three ways.
(1) Free availability of digital content in both its:
(a) Edited and Aggregated form & (b) Syndicated form;
(2) Availability of hard copy at basic cost with ‘print on demand’ technology;
(3) Availability of hard copy, ‘inexpensively priced’ and distributed through a third party. A market survey will be specifically undertaken to determine what would be an appropriate mix of distribution models.
A) OPEN TEXT BOOKS & PUBLISHING BOTTLENECKS
B) Audio/Video eBook Generation: [Vignesh and Shishir]
Create a working model for converting classroom lectures/lessons into interactive
AudioVideo eBooks [with rich short ‘audio’ and ‘video’ inputs].
Traditional classroom pedagogy, can be considerably enhanced, if aided by visually enabled learning experience.
Will add a rich new element towards re-invigorating our interest as students and scholars.
‘Rich content' [with suitably crafted audio and visual content] will enable much greater
levels of participation by students.
Methodology will be created regarding converting lessons into AV eBook format.
Will explore how AV eBooks can be made readable on mobile phones. Will require a convergence between specific hardware & software specifications.
Feasibility of mobile readability will open up education to an entire range of new possibilities including addressing the digital divide for large segments of the population.
C) Sharing Of Content & Indian Copyright Act [N S Gopalakrishnan, Lawrence & Shishir]
Broadly investigate the nature of the intersection between the right to education, which has been incorporated into the Constitution of India, and access to learning materials.
Judgment of a recent court case outlined a broad vision of the right to life:“The right to life enshrined in Article 21…means something much more than just physical survival. ... The right to life includes the right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it, namely, the bare necessaries of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing and shelter and facilities for reading, writing and expressing oneself in diverse forms…”
Phrase ‘facilities for reading, writing and expressing oneself in diverse forms’ is a useful point of departure for more closely examining its relation to greater access to text books and learning materials.
Will examine the provisions within the Indian copyright act that actively encourage the sharing of content.
As the core ethic of NMEICT is the creation and distribution of eContent, it is crucial to create appropriate copyright licensing mechanisms that actually contribute towards such a mission.
C) Sharing of content and Indian Copyright Act N S Gopalakrishnan, Lawrence & Shishir Need to maintain a balance between the rights of the authors and the right to
access materials created by such authors.
Can an author voluntarily decide to share her copyright license with the content user? Such a provision will help both the author in getting her work noticed and used more widely as the need for “permissions’ would be reduced and the user too will not be circumscribed in what she can do with the work, depending on her working within the limits of the author’s rights.
There are two things that are important for such a flexible copyright license:
Can NMEICT better help the project authors and itself in resolving issues of content sharing, which is at the heart of NMEICT vision? Are there lessons to be learnt from alternative copyright licensing mechanisms such as GPL or Creative Commons?
Can the appropriate license minimize the need for requesting permissions from the original author to use their work to make additional changes? The spirit of sharing depends on providing a degree of flexibility to new users to use the copyrighted work without much hindrance.
Deliverable Timelines:-
Year One:
a) Creation of Three Audio Visual eBooks.
b) Setting up of web-portal and aggregating content for 30 engineering topics for the OPEN Textbook Project.
c) Providing the first document on the “Sharing of content and Indian Copyright Act”.
Year Two:
a) Creation of Three Audio Visual eBooks.
b) Aggregating content for 40 engineering topics for the OPEN Textbook web-portal.
c) Syndicating three authors for writing OPEN Textbooks.
d) Inviting, hosting and disseminating the work of a reputable international scholar working in the area of digital “commons”.
e) Providing the second document on the “Sharing of content and Indian Copyright Act”.
f) Organizing a national level workshop to disseminate the learnings from the project work on leveraging digital tools for addressing the knowledge divide.
Deliverable Timelines:-
Year Three:
a) Creation of Four Audio Visual eBooks. [Total of 10]b) Aggregating content for 40 engineering topics for the OPEN Textbook web-portal. [Total of 100]c) Syndicating Three authors for writing OPEN Textbooks. [Total of 6]d) Providing the third and final document on the “Sharing of content and Indian Copyright Act”.e) 2 papers in national and international conferences and/or journals by the end of the project.f) Organizing a national level seminar on open publishing models.g) Providing a comprehensive report of the work conducted under the project
The End
Methodology
a) Conducting a market survey of college students to more precisely estimate the need of an OPEN TEXT publishing model.
b) Creation of an OPEN TEXT sustainable publishing model through qualitative search.
c) Creation of a web-portal for aggregating and syndicating OT content.
What are the right pricing strategies for eBooks? http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/the-long-fail-of-books.html http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/could_the_label.html One of the presentations was on the state of the overall book market, and had this
factoid: 93% of all ISBN's sold fewer than 1,000 units and accounted for 13% of all sales. It's tempting to think of that as "93% of all books are failures", but that's not the full story.
So without the discount and cover price information, you can't figure out whether those sub-1,000 books were really failures. Andrew (remember him, he's the researcher who went to the conference and heard the 93% titles 13% sales rule) looked at the numbers we have on the tech book market and discovered that for tech books it's 85% of titles are 10% of sales. The numbers are a little hard to comprehend, so let's turn it around: overall, bestsellers are 7% of the titles but 87% of sales. In the tech industry, 15% of the titles make 90% of sales.
http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/11/sizing_the_book.html http://www.stylusinc.com/website/print_on_demand.htm http://www.stylusinc.com/ Stylus Systems Pvt. Ltd.
# 924, 5 A CrossIst Block, HRBR Layout,Kalyan Nagar,Bangalore - 560043India.Tel: +91 80 42443000Fax: +91 80 42443001
http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_POD.htm
Potential Issues Raised By CopyrightPotential Issues Raised By Copyright
Permission Based Culture [“All Rights Reserved”]
Orphan Works: What happens to an out of print though copyright protected text [a ‘1970 text’] with its publisher either bankrupt or untraceable?
Impact on Fair Use Particularly In The Education Field
Convenience Of Using Copyright In A Digital Economy
A Digital EconomyA Digital Economy
iPod
iPhone
Kindle
The Wealth ofNetworks
NPTELNPTELWikipediaWikipedia
Rice ConnexionsRice ConnexionsMIT OpenCourseMIT OpenCourse
AmazonAmazonGoogleGoogle
ebayebayiTuneiTune
What is the appropriate 'copyright' license in an increasingly collaborative and digitised economy?
Digital RevolutionDigital Revolution
Search engines like Google, blogs, on-line recommendation and best seller lists …
DemocratizingAccess:- Connecting
Supply & Demand
3.
Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Kindle, Netflix …
DemocratizingDistribution
2.
PC + Internet, digital video-cameras, desktop music, video editing software & social computing ...
DemocratizingProduction
1.
ExamplesBusiness Process
No.
Digitisation & disruption of the “brick and mortar” economy: text, music, films
Assumptions About Digital Information FlowAssumptions About Digital Information Flow
Information economy has an intrinsic value addition: the more one uses a piece of information the more is its value.
Information is non-rivalrous: multiple users can simultaneously access the same piece of information.
Inventory cost for storing digital material is low and getting lower.
The marginal cost of (re)production is almost negligible.
Abundant, Inexpensive, and Easy Access to information is critical for the success of India’s knowledge economy.
New Digital Business Models: The Long Tail
Products low in demand or sales volume can cumulatively make up a market share that actually rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters.
Examples Of Long Tail Digital Models
Amazon.com and other Internet retailers sell more than 4 million books in print. In comparison, a typical brick and mortar bookstore [Barnes and Noble] may stock up to 100,000 most popular titles.
Do consumers really care about the remaining 3.9 million book titles?
Resounding yes, up to 40% [$1 billion in annual sales] of Amazon.com sales were in books that would normally not be found in a brick-and-mortar store. Low inventory cost + Kindle + print-on-demand technology