; Why is the public domain important to textbooks? Who is using this material?
; How would a student manually look for courses with public domain books?]
; 1. Go on a site such as McMaster's mosaic, 2. manually look at individual courses, 3. go on the book store website, 4. check what books there are, 5. search for them on IA
; this tool reduces it to two steps, 1. search for keywords on the site, 2. click on the course to see if they have any public domain books!
; What other ways can we give students more power as far as texbooks go?
; Showing potentially cheaper copies? Good, that's easy with OpenLibrary
; Sorting by cost. Students could look to see what courses have cheaper / more public domain books before enrolling in them!
; Gives instructors the possibility of seeing how their course stacks up with others
; How can we encourage instructors to make better use of the public domain?
; How can we reduce friction between convenience (one copy / translation / etc) and using public domain? Public domain often means multiple different copies of a work.
; this is why profs often discourage students from using free online copies
(t"Students can see any books available and links to better versions"))
(slide
#:title"Who uses the public domain?"
(item"Humanities students")
(item"Science students somewhat")
(item"Engineering students almost never")
(para"I examined datasets that I gathered and found that on average, the humanities and sciences are the cheapest as far as textbook costs go. They also happen to be the areas that are the oldest. Coincidence?")