Forty to fifty thousand won for every major’s book, three to four major classes per semester, the sum of money used to buy these books alone costs roughly 200,000 won. In an attempt to lessen students’ financial burden, university professors are giving up their textbook copyrights.Textbooks in contemporary society have two copyrights, offline and online. Professors are compromising with their publishing houses, giving up their online copyrights completely and publishing textbooks they wrote on the Internet.Professor Cho Young-bohk (Pusan National University) is the founder of Public Textbook and Cooperative Publishing Campaign, a campaign where professors who have written textbooks are giving up their online copyrights for students. He gave up his online copyright over the textbook, “The Principles of Business Management,” and made it accessible for his students with no charges.“Nowadays, books are expensive,” professor Cho said. “I believe that it is time for the books to be a public property which calls for releases of copyrights. I started this campaign hoping that principle-based textbooks will be turned into open sources which will then enrich our knowledge and broaden our creativity.”In Public Textbook and Cooperative Publishing Campaign, professors also convert textbooks to PDF (Portable Document Format) files and upload the files on the Web site (http://www.bigbook.or.kr/), which professor Cho pursued.In addition to the PDF converted textbooks, real time search services are also provided. Students can attach thesis, research data and more to the collaborative online textbook. Those data will be saved and be available for other users too.As of now, only students of Pusan National University have the access to the PDF file for professor Cho’s textbook, but he plans to open the source for everybody in June.Professor Cho recommended the movement to 100 professors nationwide, and so far, 20 professors have decided to join. Professors who wrote renowned textbooks but are retired or are about to retire, young professors who have not yet written any textbooks, and lastly professors well-known for their publications who have plans for talent donation have agreed to take part.“This is a big help to university students regardless of their financial status,” Kwon Ji-yoon (Pusan National University, 2) said. “In addition to the financial help, the search services will help students in studying efficiently.”Students of universities that have not yet agreed to participate are also looking forward to this movement.“I hope this campaign will spread and help more students benefit from the generosity of professors,” Lee Jee-ahn (Seoul National University of Education, 1) said.Professor Cho is anticipating for more in the future.“I dream that one day, books will be a two-way source like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia,” professor Cho said.ev6393@ewhain.net
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