[Novalug] OT - Wikipedia and the art of censorship

Dan Arico dan_arico@aricosystems.com
Mon Aug 20 10:11:25 EDT 2007


>   I suspect it's a scale-of-effort thing.  Writing a 2-screen article,
> or correcting a mis-fact is the act of a few minutes.
>
>   Writing a chapter is the act of a month.
>
>   A textbook is on the scale of an integrated accounging package,
> while a wiki article is on the scale of a simple solitair game.

There's another aspect to books, as well - portability. An open source 
textbook would be in an electronic format by necessity. The printing 
industry needs a lot of expensive equipment, manpower and materials to 
turn a text into a textbook sitting on a shelf for someone to buy. A lot 
of that is a fixed cost distributed over the number of volumes sold. Not 
much money can be spared to pay an author on a per book basis.

So how do we make an electronic text portable? The closest thing we've 
got that's generally available is the laptop. I don't know about the 
rest of you, but I find it awkward to curl up with a laptop to read.

Yes, there are more portable devices available, but they tend to be 
expensive, have tiny screens, be encumbered by DRM or all of the above. 
How hard would it be to build an open source device with simple 
controls, a decent sized screen and a USB port for loading and unloading 
text? Single board computers are getting really small. Flash memory is 
getting really big. The cost and power requirements of displays are 
coming down. We've got the OS.

We could be on the verge of a revolution in the publishing industry.

Dan Arico


-- 
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all, and in the Darkness bind them,
In the land of Redmond, where the Sales Reps lie.



More information about the Novalug mailing list