Celebrate Small Victories: Digital Foundations has run through its initial print run of 8000 copies, and gone into reprints. The publisher has reprinted a run of 4000 copies to meet demand. This semester it was adopted at over 100 colleges and universities; hopefully that number will steadily increase semester by semester. But for now, we celebrate reprints!

Last weekend was the epic Digital Foundations–>FLOSS Book Sprint, led by Adam Hyde of FLOSSmanuals.net and Eyebeam Senior Fellow Michael Mandiberg. Around 25 volunteers convened at Eyebeam over the course of 3 days to translate Digital Foundations from Adobe to FLOSS (Free Libre Open Sources Software) applications, making good on the promise of Digital Foundations’ Creative Commons license.

Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSSmanuals.net, guided what he has termed the “Book Sprint” where both experts and novices collaborate with the aim of writing an entire book in a fixed period of time. The process was exciting, exhausting, an effective. We are proud to say that the new translation of Digital Foundations and Intro to Media Design with FLOSS is currently available on the FLOSSmanuals.net site, and will be in print shortly. One more step closer to easing the monopolizing power of proprietary software companies.

Digital Foundations: An Intro to Media Arts with the Adobe Creative Suite is officially in print. Amazon has switched their Pre-Order status to In Stock!

Digital Foundations (http://digital-foundations.net/) takes the formal principles and exercises of the Bauhaus and uses them to teach hands on design software exercises. These are supplemented with historical visual examples from the public domain and contemporary creative commons licensed work. As Media Arts professors my co-author xtine burrough and I were tired of design software books that left out aesthetics, and history.  Or worse: gave terrible examples complete with author’s vacation photographs, drop shadows, and the watercolor filter!

We are thrilled to have the book in print… with a Creative Commons license!  This is a first for AIGA Design Press, New Riders, and Peachpit, and the result of 9 months of negotiation. The whole book was written on a wiki (http://wiki.digital-foundations.net) and that is all available for use under a CC license.

We are reaping the fruit of that license already: February 6-8 Adam Hyde and his FLOSSmanuals.net crew are going to come to Eyebeam in NYC to translate the book from Adobe to FLOSS applications.

I was sent my advance copy last week, and it is gorgeous.  The design came out better than we thought.

from an interview related to Harvard’s Digital Natives project.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/02/digital
(tx Rose)

Q: Does being exposed to many and varying media, including multiple sources on the Internet, make students think more critically about the information they consume? Or are digital natives increasingly used to trusting what they see online, so much so that a “cut-and-paste” culture is becoming a threat to educational ethics?

UG: …

With regard to the “cut-and-paste” question: We can indeed observe an increased level of interactivity between digital natives and content when compared to older generations. Recipients are no longer passive receivers of information, but increasingly active users. The level of interactivity — of what kids do with content — ranges from simple cut-and-paste on the one end of the spectrum to much more creative uses on the other end — including the making of mash-ups, where for instance video footage is combined with a song from a different source. While only a small percentage of digital natives use digital technologies in the most creative ways, we believe that the Internet has an enormous potential for creative expression that should be embraced and can lead to a participatory culture. To be sure, many of those forms of “doing things with content” have legal and/or ethical implications. It’s therefore important to educate children about the basic dos and don’ts when they use online content for their own purposes. Educators and parents have to work together to engage our children in a conversation about information ethics and teach them about the principles of copyright law. It’s important, however, that we teach our kids not only what they are not allowed to do, but also to show them what can be done with content in ethically sound and lawful ways. At the Berkman Center, we’re currently developing such a balanced educational tool for children and teachers.

In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki links to books at Project Gutenberg for older texts. This kept the students’ reading list to below $40, an important consideration when tuition seems to go up every year. Students could also collaborate, posting class notes and helping to develop the course.

Update: R. Preston McAfee speaks about this on On The Media.   Great interview.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Full post from Lessig.org here

NYTimes reports on textbook piracy. Textbooks are being scanned and torrented on The Pirate Bay, et all.  Scanning the entirety of a text book seems like a lot of work, but I guess it pays off:

Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

So the Napster moment is coming for print publishers? I think they have a certain fear of this.  I think there is a willingness to try new things, but the problems is locking them down with DRM doesn’t work, and doesn’t make anyone happy.  I think this has a lot to do with why we were given a Creative Common license for Digital Foundations

 The Browse Inside Full Access promotion of American Gods drove 85 thousand visitors to our site to view 3.8 Million pages of the book (an average of 46 pages per person). On average, visitors spent over 15 minutes reading the book.

The Indies [ie. independent booksellers -- Neil] are the only sales channel where we have confidence that incremental sales were driven by this promotion. In the Bookscan data reported for Independents we see a marked increase in weekly sales across all of Neil’s books, not just American Gods during the time of the contest and promotion. Following the promotion, sales returned to pre-promotion levels.

Gaiman’s Journal for full post

To that end, she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found, and they refused. Now they’re suing Google over Google Print, claiming copyright infringement. Meghann is not too happy with this development.

It is amazing to see the publishers *not* get it.  Every study shows that Google Print and Amazon’s Search Withing The Book increase sales.  And they benefit long tail authors.

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