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Their submission form is ridiculous.

http://www.saylor.org/otc-form/

I was going to submit this: http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg_Jan_2011.pdf

An excellent (imo) book on introductory assembly and computer organization, but I'm not going to write out their "course mapping forms" and send in my resume just to submit it.

They can't be serious.



The form is clearly aimed at authors and that book's copyright clearly makes it ineligible. They're asking for free ("as in freedom") textbooks, not for people to upload pdfs of ebooks that they know of.


The copyright explicitly says it can be republished.

Also, you realize it's from a California State edu address, right? It isn't just some random e-book.


It can be republished only provided no charge is made. They want a book that the author owns the rights to, and is willing to put out under CC-BY.

Just because something has a liberal licence, doesn't mean it's compatible with other liberal licences. This ebook, for example, would not be considered FOSS (it couldn't be put in Debian, for example).


How would you rather prefer submission?


* If it's only for authors, the form should clearly state that at the beginning. Not just loosely imply it by using the phrase "your textbook," which could easily mean one that the reader owns or uses.

* There should be a link to a form where regular visitors (non-authors) can submit books. It would be more appropriate for their staff to follow-up with authors anyway at that point, once given the leads.


Based on your scenario and if this was successful, wouldn't the incentive/money for authors to write new textbooks be removed?




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