On Joining the Commons

Today, we dipped a toe into the waters of the Creative Commons pool. We’ve been working with the Nepal wing of the One Laptop Per Child project and the Open Learning Exchange, Nepal had written to us asking if we could provide content for their project in multiple ways:

1. On their low cost laptops being distributed for children’s use.
2. In their eBook library.
3. Translated into Neplai for local use.

We had sent them:

1. Annual Haircut Day
2. Moon and the Cap
3. Happy Maths 1- 4

You can see and download all these books at our Scribd gallery by clicking here.

They liked these books very much and we have licensed them under a Attribution­-Noncommercial­-Share Alike 2.5 India Creative Commons Licence.

Our thanks to the authors, Noni and Mala Kumar and the illustrators, Angie and Upesh for making this possible.

Update:

Thanks to Philipp for the write up. He goes on to add:

… the NonCommercial option makes things unnecessarily complicated, but since they are part of a larger commercial publisher, I suspect it was the mother company’s fear of the unknown (Share What?) that meant it would be non-commercial or non-creative commons. And choosing pdf as the only file format for publishing them makes remixing a bit complicated (in fact, so complicated that Gautam himself was unable to remove the “all rights reserved” disclaimer from the books – he added the creative commons blurb at the end). So, there is room for improvement, but more importantly it’s another step in the right direction – and yet another project we can point to that has found a way to make open licenses work.

We’d be happy to hear from everyone on what formats to post this in and how to make this easier to re-use and remix.

Update:

We also have some free books for download here.