A publishing house that only releases finished books
A book from this house runs fifty pages at the very least, it is read in full by someone who did not write it, and its text can be reused without asking us.
See the catalogueHow it is made
What this house publishes
Teaching textbooks are what ODERSA publishes here: continuous courses, with their exercises and worked answers, laid out the way a publisher lays out a book. Every title will be readable online and downloadable. There is no account to open, no free trial, and no chapter that slips away at the moment it becomes useful.
The catalogue is empty today, and this page says so before anything else. No title is announced, no date is put forward. What already exists is the rule: this house only puts a book online once it is whole, read by someone other than its author, and dated.
That rule has a cost, and the cost is accepted. A complete textbook takes weeks for a single title, where a worksheet site publishes a hundred in the same time. ODERSA would rather hold a short, dependable shelf than a thick catalogue in which nobody can tell what is finished.
How a book comes into being
Five leaves, in the order they are laid down. None of them is skipped, and the fourth is the one a publisher in a hurry forgets.
First leaf
One title is chosen, and only one
A book opens with a decision of the association, not with an urge. The question is plain: which textbook is genuinely missing, and for whom. A subject already covered by a complete, openly licensed work is not opened, even when it would be easy to write.
The house works on one title at a time. Two parallel projects each advance half as fast, and the second always ends up borrowing chapters written for the first.
Second leaf
Everything is written, down to the table of contents
The course, the progression, the exercises, the worked answers, the openly licensed illustrations that go with them: all of it is written for that one book. A textbook is not an assembly of documents that already existed.
The floor is fifty pages. Below that, a text cannot carry a full progression with its exercises: it is a worksheet, it has a place elsewhere at ODERSA, but not under the name of a book.
Third leaf
Somebody else reads all of it
Checking is crossed, and it is an obligation: nobody proofreads their own text. The reader follows the reasoning, works the exercises again, checks the answers and writes down what does not hold. Their job is not to polish the prose, it is to find mistakes.
The rule applies to every language published. A translation proofread by its translator has not been proofread.
Fourth leaf
The book gets its colophon, and its caveat
A colophon says who made the book, when, with what, and under which licence. It also carries the sentence few publishers write down: double checking reduces mistakes, it does not remove them.
This is the leaf that gets skipped when time is short, and it is the one that makes a book defensible. A dated, signed work can be corrected; an anonymous one can only be replaced.
Fifth leaf
It appears in all its languages on the same day
A translation that arrives six months later is not a translation: it is another edition, and the two diverge from the first correction onwards. A book from this house appears everywhere at once.
From then on the book lives: whatever is reported gets corrected, and the book is redated. The verification date printed inside is never restamped without a real verification.
What gets in, what does not
Enters the catalogue
- A complete textbook, with its progression, its exercises and its worked answers.
- A text read in full by someone who did not write it.
- A dated colophon, naming who made the book and with what.
- An open licence on the content, written inside the book and not only on this site.
- Illustrations whose licence has been checked at its own source page, one by one.
Does not get in
- A collection of worksheets, however good: without a progression it is not a textbook.
- A manuscript proofread by its own author, or proofread halfway.
- A sample that makes you want to buy the rest: this house sells nothing.
- An illustration whose licence is claimed by a repository but not by its source page.
- A book announced before it exists, with or without a date.
The text can be reused, the design cannot. That is the single exception to everything else being open here, and it is named rather than left vague.
What a book from this house is
Whole
Fifty pages at the very least, from the first chapter to the table of contents, exercises and answers included. A textbook that stops halfway is not published.
Checked
Checking is crossed: nobody proofreads their own text. The verification date is printed in the book, and it is only restamped after a real verification.
Reusable
The text is under a Creative Commons Attribution licence: it can be translated, photocopied, adapted and even sold, on the single condition that ODERSA is credited.
Dated
Every book carries its colophon: who made it, when, with what, and the caveat that it may still contain mistakes despite double checking.
Why a publishing house, and not a worksheet site
A textbook is not a collection of documents. It has an order, a progression, a vocabulary introduced in the second chapter and used in the ninth, exercises that come back to what has just been learnt. Someone studying alone needs that order. A teacher preparing a unit needs to know where the book is heading.
Openly licensed textbooks already exist, and this house says so before talking about itself. In English, a whole catalogue of open textbooks is peer-reviewed and adopted by universities. In French, teachers have been publishing complete mathematics textbooks under an open licence for more than twenty years, editable files included. In Spanish, a collective of state-school teachers does the same across several subjects. The addresses are on the sources page, and ODERSA has no reason to redo that work.
The real gap lies elsewhere, and it is the same everywhere: wherever a state hands out the textbook for free, it almost always forbids reprinting it. You may download; you may not adapt, translate, or have two hundred copies run off for a classroom. And in the languages this association serves most, no complete openly licensed textbook can be found at all. That is the exact place this house is taking: free of charge does not mean free to reuse, and it is the second that is missing.
No book is published to date. The making method, on the other hand, is written down and public: it says what a book from this house must hold before it goes online, and that is what can be judged today.