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Open University to put full textbooks on-line |
Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

Open University to put full textbooks on-line

Ehud Zion Waldoks , THE JERUSALEM POST

May. 14, 2008

The Open University has uploaded the full text of dozens of textbooks onto
its Web site, which will be available to the public free of charge beginning
next Thursday.

In the first initiative of its kind to place so many full texts on-line, the
university has reformatted textbooks from 10 of its courses to a readable
electronic format and posted them on the site at
http://per.openu.ac.il/.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the first to start
putting materials on-line six years ago, but the Open University's project
is the first to place entire books on-line.

Among the courses whose books have been uploaded are "The Theater
Experience," "Trends in Israeli Society," "Genocide," "From National
Homeland to State-in-the-Making," "Critical Thinking," "Fundamentals of
Physics" and "Statistics." Materials from a course in Russian called
"Between Jews and Christians" will also be made available.

As soon as enough materials are translated into Arabic, they will be
uploaded as well.

Next year, the university hopes to put textbooks and other course materials
from 40 more courses on-line.

The easy-to-use electronic format will even allow readers to mark the books
and search by keyword.

"The university was founded 34 years ago to make education accessible. The
university does not demand matriculation exams or psychometric tests.
Putting up these textbooks continues that vision," Prof. Ora Limor, the
university's vice president for academic affairs, told The Jerusalem Post on
Wednesday.

"There are many people who can't make it to classes. This bridges the
physical gap and gives them access to knowledge," she said.

"Regarding copyrights, the books that were written specifically for us are
ours to do with as we wish. However, there are pictures or quotes from other
authors [for] which we have obtained permission from them," she told the
Post.

There was an open question about what it would do to the price of books, she
added.

"We print a million volumes a year, and we don't know how this will affect
that. We hope that it won't hurt sales, but rather the opposite - people
will become interested by reading on-line and then go out and buy the book
so that they can read it more comfortably or not have to print out hundreds
of pages," she said.

Limor said the project had already cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars and would probably cost more.

She added that audio versions of the books would also be available as MP3
downloads so that "one could listen to a book while sitting at the Dead
Sea."

There will be a formal launching ceremony next Thursday attended by the
president of the UK's Open University, upon which the Israeli institution is
based.
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