Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts « Saylor.org – Free Online Courses Built by Professors

"We are are very pleased to announce that all Flat World Knowledge textbooks published under an open license are permanently and freely available from Saylor.org — free to read, free to download, free to share and remix under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. The Bookshelf will initially provide .pdf and MS Word (.doc, .docx) versions of each book. We are actively building .epub versions, which will begin to appear in the early weeks of 2013, and we will introduce a more sophisticated Bookshelf in early January. We are also taking special care to ensure that our efforts comply with the books’ licensing, and especially that our versions retain the essential qualities of the originals. Spread the word! Please share this post and the Bookshelf link (www.saylor.org/books) with your networks. (edit: those networks include a number of other efforts to make sure that these titles are preserved, adapted, and promoted, not the least of which is Scott Leslie’s call to action on edtechpost, which doubles as a nice primer on the wherefores of preserving the commons.  Thanks to OLDaily for the hint. Thanks, too, to those who have called out David Lippman’s freshly opened archive on Twitter.) Beyond merely preserving a version of these texts in amber, we hope to provide a foundation for continued extension and re-imagining of these wonderful texts. We hope you will contribute links to your remixes and supplementary materials, helping the texts stay dynamic and useful for a very long time to come. (For an example of a re-mixed text, see David Wiley’s Project Management for Instructional Designers [http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2629], a remix of FWK’s Project Management from Simple to Complex [http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/16].) Like many others in the education community and the world at large, Saylor.org relies on free, open access to a good number of these texts. We are happy to be able to contribute these titles for our courses and for yours. Questions? Thoughts? Leave a comment, or get in touch!"