Indonesian government wants to buy text book copyrights
From the excellent [i:boekoe] blog on book culture in Indonesia, comes a press release about the Indonesian government. I have translated it below (slightly shortened):
The Indonesian government buys the copyright to textbooks
(From the newspaper Kompas, February 8, 2008)The Indonesian government has decided to buy the copyright of textbooks for primary, secondary and high school. The purpose is to bring down the price of textbooks to a quarter of the current price, and make books accessible to people. This was announced by president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in a press conference on the 6th of Feburary, 2008, after a meeting with the Department of Education, which discussed the evaluation of the program priorities of the department of education in 2005-2007, and their work program for 2008.
1200 persons from the education sector participated in the meeting, which was held in the Plaza Depdiknas (Department of Education) in Sudirman Street. There was also the vice president Muhammad Jusuf Kalla, ministers, governors, district heads and mayors from all over Indonesia, as well as headmasters, and deans of higher education institutions.
According to the president, one of the problems in the education sector is the price of text books. Because the books are expensive, many parents are not able to buy them, which inhibits the learning of their children. An important step is thus to reduce the price of text books. “One of the ways we’ll do this is through buying the copyright and giving the production rights to other publishers, so that the price of books can be reduced”, said the president. This step is also intended to avoid monopoly within the text book industry.
According to the president, the minister of education, Bambang Sudibyo, and provincial governments, have already been asked to follow up on this decision. The president added that the maximum prices of text books will later be set, so that there will be no more expensive text books. According to the president, the buying of copyright will happen gradually, according to the budget which is available. The target is more than 250 books. We hope that this can happen quickly. The Education Department will study the list of titles to be bought in detail.
I actually heard this about half a year ago, when I participated in the World Book Day 2007 at the Department of Education plaza on Sudirman (same place as this was announced), however I have not seen a written source until now. I have the same thought in mind now, as I had then: This is a very interesting idea, but we should really try to campaign to have them adopt Creative Commons licenses for the material, and put it online as well. This might not make a huge difference to Indonesian school children (yet), but since they own the copyrights anyway, they could make a huge contribution to projects like Wikibooks, Wikipedia etc. And hopefully in the future they can also produce better quality and cheaper teaching materials by adapting material from open resources.
I even sent out a request to the isummit mailing list to see if they know of any groups promoting Creative Commons or open licensing in Indonesia, but so far I have not come across any.
Stian
February 10th, 2008 @ 0:52
Interesting. I’ve always assumed government-run schools would create their own textbooks (hence no copyright clearance issue). That’s how it’s done in Singapore for the Primary to Secondary levels.
March 27th, 2008 @ 16:04
[…] In February, I translated a news report about the Indonesian government planning to buy the Copyright for Indonesian text books, and let libraries distribute them freely. At that time I made a plea for these books to be also released as Creative Commons on the web. Since then three more articles have been published on [i:boekoe] about this scheme, and I will summarize/paraphrase the information below (please consult the original article for exact quotes), interspersed with my own comments. […]
April 6th, 2008 @ 13:42
[…] I have written about the plan to buy the copyright for textbooks in Indonesia and publish the books online (here, and here). Today I found out, through the excellent Indian book blog Scholars Without Borders that the Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text books. From this page, you can choose which year, and which subject, and receive the title desired. The first thing you get is a PDF with the contents, and at first I was very disappointed thinking that was the only thing I’d get, about to give up. Then I realized that the TOC is hyperlinked to the individual PDFs for the different chapters. However, these hyperlinks did not work neither in Preview nor in Skim, which I usually use - I had to download Acrobat Reader to view them. I hope at some point they will make available direct links to the different chapters, or better yet, a zip file containing the whole book, for offline reading (also beneficial to those with slow internet). […]
April 7th, 2008 @ 9:20
[…] (Read about the background here, and here). An update on the copyright buying project, from [i:boekoe], taken from an article in Kompas, March 27, 2008. […]
April 7th, 2008 @ 12:01
[…] (Background here, here and here) From Kompas, April 7, 2008, through [i:boekoe], Rab A. Broto, director of the Sekolah Penulis Pembelajar (School of Writing and Learning?). […]