There are a couple models for paying authors of public domain educational works that I think would work reasonably well. (For reasons why educational works should be released into the public domain, see A case for public domain educational material). The first is the street performer protocol, which I discussed in a previous post. The other, which is more tailored to the specific problem of how authors of public domain educational works are paid will be described here. I call this model the Educator Donation Model.
Virtually all educational institutions use hard copies of educational works in their classrooms. This is likely to remain the case for some time because of people’s preference for reading educational material from a book rather than on a screen. As a result, educational institutions will continue to purchase printed educational works from publishers even if all the educational works they use are in the public domain since it is still relatively expensive to print a class set of textbooks oneself.
Continue reading ‘Making a living authoring public domain works’
