I am thinking of school books and you are thinking of technical books.
Only 70% of india's kids finish Primary School, for those kids bookpool/orielly is not what is needed. http://www.unicef.org/sowc04/16225.html
You mentioned Wikipedia that works quite well. Mobile libraries library networks all work well. See what one organisation is doing in TN http://www.aidsfbay.org/events/2005/sanhiti/eureka/
However the problem those kids face is the cost of textbooks. I am not even asking for latest books, can I please reprint redistribute and modify and adapt 10 year old textbooks? Those I know can be printed for under Rs.10-20 whereas the latest ones cost whatever they cost (I would assume 50-100). It can make a difference between a life or learning or a life of ignorance and slavery.
Even more importantly, most of us on this list have gone to good schools with good teachers. Can we record the lectures from the classrooms of the best teachers and make it available under a creativecommons Share-Alike license? The kids who cant afford good teachers will now get the same quality of education that we got. For an example see Digital Study Hall http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/ (although their licensing detail is not known)
In short we need Free as in Freedom Knowledge, without it we are slaves. See also the other email I sent out the essay Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman.
-Krishna
Kush be_a_sport@rogers.com wrote:Books, magazines and newspapers are the cheapest sources of knowledge still and many people have tried many ideas to have books spread around. Wikipedia is a very good solution to broaden the horizon and collaborate on systematising knowledge. We have to keep an open mind and try various approaches to make libraries viable/ possible. I know of a few innovative approaches and there may be thousands of others. (such as 1 --discounted books bookpool.com(50% costs for latest computer books --doesn't work in India though because of customs/bureaucracy) or 2 --collaborative ventures of an Indian publisher with Oreilly in Bombay which has reduced costs of latest technical books drastically, 3--bookcrossing.com (sharing books), 4--article in the bbc which mentioned revolving libraries at street corners --leave a book at designated street corners and people will read them and return them back to those places --experiment very very successful in beijing or shanghai or some chinese city (no fixed cost for hiring large buildings for libraries), 5--mobile libraries, 6--library networks etc etc)
Cost is not a constraint to an innovative mind (as the saying goes --where there is a will, there is a way). There are analogies to the free software world too --we have quite a lot of ebooks which can be copied onto CDs/DVDs for increasing penetration and knowledge (producingoss.com pragmaticprogrammer.com (ruby version 1) cathedral and the bazaar, unix programming culture, hacker folklore, etc etc) but I don't think anybody has tried to list so many titles and give away documentation etc the way gutenberg.net is doing from a one stop platform or website, in India, either on a state level or a national/regional level. The opencd.org ultimatebootcd.com etc are not known as much as they could be known.
===================================== Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman "Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought by Eben Moglen mp3 ogg Free Knowledge blog
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