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Welcome to The CITE -- a blog on Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education. CITE is a pun with multiple meanings - referring to cite as in citation, something people reference; site as in location, website, or place people go to; and sight as in foresight or looking ahead to what is coming. Comments, discussion, feedback and ideas are welcome.


Disclaimer: Although I am an employee of the National Association of College Stores (NACS), the views and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and not necessarily those of NACS or any person or organization affiliated or doing business with NACS or its subsidiaries.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Freeing books using Crowdfunds

Here a story about a new company using crowd funded approach to putting books under Creative Commons licenses.   The company allows individuals or institutions to join together to pay rights holders to re-license the works under a CC license.

In this process, the book’s digital rights holder sets the price to make a book as a Creative Commons, DRM-free e-book.   Then the company starts a crowd funding campaign to raise money to set the book “free.”  Once the money is raised the book is released and the company takes a commission.

Not sure that this business model will work beyond a select set of content, but it is yet another interesting twist on the content market.

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