Thanks to Open Education News for clueing me into this recent news item from the University of New Mexico. Members of the UM PIRG group staged a protest over the state of textbook publishing by creating a textbook graveyard on their campus for the books that the campus store would not buy back. And the students have a solution, "At UNM, we're trying to get professors to sign an open-source textbook commitment and try and get them to switch their textbooks over to something more affordable and easier to obtain."

My first thought was let's have National Textbook Graveyard day every spring time to protest the state of publishing and promote open access textbooks. But then this got me wondering about the huge recycling problem colleges would have if millions of out-of-date textbooks were deposited in the middle of campuses across the country. Hmmm...that raises another issue connected to the textbook buyback market that I've never seen discussed. Isn't the rapid releasing of new editions--thus making the older versions worthless--an environmental sustainability issue? What about the thousands of trees that this market system is using each year? What about the energy used in the production and distribution of those texts? The energy and time necessary to recycle them?

Yesterday, we went live with an open access textbook project--Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. This is a new book series which will contain peer-reviewed collections of essays--all composed by teachers for students--with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. Our mission is to build a library of quality open access texts for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks. The first volume (or two) will focus on first year composition; with later volumes, we hope to have special collections for the writing in the disciplines, professional writing, creative writing, and other classrooms.

Writing Spaces is a good bit different from Wikibooks because of our essay format and, I also believe, a better fit for academics who need clear evidence of contribution and peer review to receive credit for their work in tenure and promotion reviews. As a consequence, this is a model which might also work well for other disciplines.

So for all you Kairosnews readers who have been strong open access and open source advocates, we hope you'll join with us in making this project a success by submitting a proposal for an essay for our first volume. Please check out our CFP.

Lessig has posted a request for Creative Commons users to complete a questionnaire regarding the term "noncommercial."

If you are a CC user, take a few minutes and complete the survey.

BTW: I've always been bothered by CC's definition of noncommercial use because it attempts to define the character of the use (through the use of the term "commercial advantage") rather than just making it about free access to the work. I don't care at all if a for-profit entity uses my work as long as they are not charging for access to it and it is clearly licensed. For those that are interested, here's the relevant paragraph from the legal code of one of the licenses:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

OpenOffice 3.0 has been released. In addition to the traditional Windows and Linux versions, Mac fans will be glad to hear that there is now a native OSX version. See Ars Technica for more details or go straight to the download page.