It’s not about textbooks per se (although I hope they’re used as such), but I know the new series in Energy, Ecology and Environment that NiCHE is co-sponsoring with University of Calgary Press is planning to have its books available online as well as in print.

I understand part of the rationale is open access and getting environmental history out there in new ways; but it’s also to allow authors to have the opportunity to incorporate more material like maps & other images which are generally very expensive to reproduce in publications. (At least, that’s what we’re hoping, with the book about Parks Canada coming out next year! [/shameless plug]) And it looks like this project is thinking along the same lines, from the few pages I looked at, so this might reflect the visual turn and snaps-over-text preferences of “kids these days.”

I’m somewhat less sure about the wiki-format compared to, say, more conventional scholarly routines like peer review, when it comes to things I’d want to use for teaching, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

Thanks for your contribution.

Copyright laws exist either for the protection of the creator, or for the benefit of the public. There is no middle ground. As long as we keep entrusting the government (any government) to find the right “balance” between the two, we are destined to keep on making up exclusions from limitations on exceptions from the rights – without even stopping for a second to question why we are doing this.

“Thanks for pointing out a huge hole in my recent post about the proposed Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-32). I had, unfortunately, not considered the impact this might have on historians who publish with commercial publishers and rely on the income from those books. I also hadn’t considered the impact this would have on custom coursepack printers and textbook publishers. I’d have to take a finer look at the details of the bill to be sure, but I suppose it might be possible for a university instructor to assign a PDF copy of 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal or Louisbourg Portraits without having to order a class set of books for sale at the university bookstore. Or it might allow instructors to by-pass custom coursepack printers like Canadians Scholars Press Inc. by scanning digital coursepacks. In these cases the costs, as you know, are often actually absorbed by undergraduate students and not universities.

I do, however, completely agree that this may be exploited by cash-strapped school boards under pressure from provincial education ministries to do more with less for high schools and elementary schools. This indeed could be a big loss for commercial publishers and possibly for their authors (depending on the particular royalty agreements between authors and publishers).

While I’m not certain that this legislation would usher in a new era of piracy, it could certainly disrupt current commercial publishing business models that rely on course textbook orders or even software licensing to get a slice of that “$40 billion undertaking in this country,” we call education. I’m inclined to agree with your point that “it’s as reasonable for schools and universities to pay for the intellectual content they depend on as to pay the teachers who expound upon those texts.” However, this does raise the question of whether publicly-funded universities (or other schools) and their instructors have any obligation to support the existing business models of private commercial publishers that have been built upon the public education system.

In the end, most of the textbooks upon which educators rely are produced by commercial publishers and universities, school boards, and ministries of education should recognize and pay for the intellectual labour put into these works. Whether we like it or not, the publicly funded school systems in Canada are integrated in the commercial education industry in a similar manner to the way public health insurance systems in this country are integrated into the commercial health industry. Unless this changes, I would have to agree with your final point that when it comes to the intellectual work of authors such as yourself educators must “deal honestly and fairly with it.”

Thanks again for adding your commentary to what is a critical issue for history educators, researchers, and authors.”

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