[FM Discuss] fm working with other publishers

[adam hyde]

hi,

I just wanted to forward this excerpt from an interview with Michael
Mandiberg. He is talking to Sarah Cook about his work and mentions FM
and the Digital Foundations book. Its an interesting short paragraph or
two and reflects on how to convince publishers that open content is
good :

"MM: We got the first Creative Commons license out of Peachpit and New
Riders. It is being published by AIGA Design Press. That was a huge
accomplishment, it was about trying to explain to these businesses how
Creative Commons is not a threat to them, in fact it’s a benefit. So we
went through a whole lot of explaining, constantly reassuring and giving
them case studies. I need to write a ‘How to’?? because we're one of the
first people to do this in an adversarial context, even the other people
listed as being major Creative Commons authors in this kind of context,
in fact only have Creative Commons license on their online version which
is their manuscript. 

One of the central ways we were able to convince them was by showing our
partnership with FLOSS Manuals and Adam Hyde. Adam and I have been
talking for six or seven months about translating the book into Gimp,
Inkscape and the other key Open Source apps. There are these core ideas
and its separating the ideas and the exercises from the button pushing.
So via the Creative Commons license we were able to say, ‘Look, we have
an immediate partner who wants to expand this idea’, and I have to spin
it to them in words they understand i.e. build a brand, win mind share
then market share, all this marketing stuff, that's what they
understood. We were able to do it. So we are going to start once we
finish the actual, real book which I am crazily working on right now.
Adam, xtine and I are going to start figuring out how to translate the
book into the Open Source applications, and then (because Floss Manuals
is heavily translation based,) it will then be translated into Farsi
etc. 

DS: So how did the publishers react to the idea that it would be
translated for free into different languages? Did they see it as an
added value? 

MM: Yes, I just kept saying you are not going to get someone to buy the
Farsi translation rights, and you are not going to get someone to buy
the Open Source translation rights. You are loosing nothing, and gaining
much. For me the goal of this book has been to change the way design
education happens at the introductory level. I teach in a classroom when
I’m not here at Eyebeam, its a computer lab, there are fifteen
Macintoshes in it. I get a bunch of nineteen year old students who have
never been in a drawing classroom, they have never been in a dirty arts
classroom. They have never drawn, and if they have, it was in high
school, but they don't have those fundamental visual skills. This is
true across the country in these design departments and visual
communication departments as they have to spend money on computers, and
they have to have places to put them - the drawing classrooms get
cleaned out, scrubbed down and turned into a computer lab. So we have
lost the location in which we would teach visual skills. What we are
trying to do is find a way to bring back that introduction to visuality
into to a computer class. For me the goal in all of this is to make a
change, and I have made it clear to the publisher that's our goal and
that it is good for them because it builds their brand, and using the
words they understand, building a brand as an educational reformer is a
positive thing. When you frame it that way, getting into as many
languages as possible, they like it. Realistically they do sell the
rights to translate it, they will probably sell a Spanish, German,
French and Italian version. If the Chinese want to copy it they are just
going to copy it, and I think they would be better off by having some
sort of control over it by making it part of the license that allows
them to do that. 
"

http://www.crumbweb.org/getInterviewDetail.php?id=31&ts=1249552619&op=3&sublink=1

adam







-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
German mobile : + 49 15 2230 54563
Email : adam at flossmanuals.net
irc: irc.freenode.net #flossmanuals

"Free manuals for free software"
http://www.flossmanuals.net/about