Improvisation Blog: Open Educational Resources and Book Printing Machines

"Let's say a teacher writes a book. They send it to a publisher and sign away their rights to it. In signing away their rights to the content, they are restricted in what they might do with the content in future. The book might be very expensive and so the people who a teacher wants to read it, cannot afford it. There may be chunks of text which they might want to extract and republish for a different audience. They can't do it.

I think this is about to change. One of the exciting developments in recent years has been print-on-demand self-publishing. Alongside this, professional typesetting has become within easy reach of anyone. LaTeX-driven tools like Overleaf (http://overleaf.com) make a once-esoteric skill accessible to all. And the book printing machines like Xerox's Espresso Book Machine are the most powerful exemplars of 3D printing

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Why will academics exploit this? Because, whilst publishing with a respectable publishing house is often seen as a 'status marker', it also constrains the freedom of the academic to manage their own resources and engagement with their academic community."