Frequently asked questions

Yes, entirely, and with no account. ODERSA is a non-profit association: it sells nothing, so there is nothing to unlock. No page on this site leads to a payment.

No, and there will not be: the statutes of the association forbid selling anything in return. What you see is all there is.

No. There are no accounts on this site, so nothing to create and nothing to lose. A download is a link, clicked or not.

None. The site does not know how many times a file has been taken, so it cannot limit anything.

The content, meaning the text, the exercises and the worked answers, is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, written CC BY 4.0. The editorial design, meaning the layout and the visual identity, stays with ODERSA, all rights reserved. They are two separate regimes and it is written at the foot of every page.

Copying, distributing, printing, translating, adapting and even selling, in any format and for any purpose, on the single condition that the author is credited and that changes are indicated.

Because it identifies the house. Knowledge should circulate; the design is the work through which it becomes readable, and it is what says who publishes. Taking the text and laying it out yourself is the intended use. Publishing something else under our appearance is not. It is the single exception to everything else being open here, and it is named on purpose rather than left vague.

No. A Creative Commons licence is irrevocable: what has been published under CC BY 4.0 stays under it, even if the association changes its mind, changes its name, or ceases to exist.

A share-alike clause obliges whoever reuses the text to republish under the same licence. It is a sound principle, and it is also a real obstacle: an authority or a publisher that cannot commit its own output to an open licence then gives up on reusing the textbook. This house chose the least friction available.

Same terms: CC BY 4.0. The counter and content files download from the settings panel and from the site map, and they are made to be read by a machine.

The title of the work, the name ODERSA, the address of this site, and the CC BY 4.0 notice with a link to the licence text. If you changed the text, add that. Four elements, and the attribution is complete.

Yes, without asking anyone, and with no quota. The licence allows full reproduction. Only the editorial design stays reserved, and a photocopy of the book as it stands does not touch it.

Yes. CC BY 4.0 allows commercial use, and the association asks for no payment. A school that has copies printed and sells them at cost is within its rights; so is a printer taking a margin.

Yes, as translator. The original text stays attributed to ODERSA, your translation work is yours, and you choose the licence of your translation, including a more permissive one.

Yes, the licence draws no distinction between paper and software. The attribution has to stay visible to the person using the app, not only inside the code.

Somebody who did not write them. The association calls it crossed checking, and it is an obligation rather than an optional good practice. The reader follows the reasoning, works the exercises again and compares them with the answers.

Yes, language by language. A translation proofread by its translator has not been proofread: a translator sees what they meant to write, not what they wrote.

The date is printed in the book, in its colophon. It is only restamped after a real verification: republishing a book without rereading it does not change its date.

Programs do, at every release, and they refuse to publish. The making page lists them: contrasts recalculated in the five display states, licences cross-checked against disk in both directions, links and anchors, overflow measured at 360 and 500 pixels, rendering without JavaScript, blocked storage, and offline reading proven with the server switched off.

Probably, and the association writes it into every colophon rather than waiting for someone to find out: double checking reduces mistakes, it does not remove them. A publisher who promises zero mistakes promises what cannot be delivered.

By email to the publishing team, at the address printed at the foot of every page and in the settings panel. Give the page and the exact sentence: a precise report gets corrected and redated, a vague one needs a full rereading.

ODERSA checks, corrects it if it is a mistake, redates the book and says what changed on the What is new page. If it is not a mistake, the reply explains why: a disagreement about method is not an error, and it deserves an argument rather than being filed away.

A French non-profit association under the 1901 Act, whose registration numbers are printed at the foot of every page on this site. The Library is its publishing house, and one of its educational resources.

The association publishes them and takes responsibility for their content: it is the collective author of what it puts out, and it is the association that gets credited. Each book names in its colophon who made it and who checked it.

By grants and philanthropy, and by nothing commercial: the statutes forbid it. No funder has any say over the content of a book, and the open licence turns each grant into a common good that anyone can pick up.

It is meant first for teachers and for adults studying on their own. Pupils reach it through their teacher, and the textbooks are written to be used in class as much as alone.

Nothing. No account, no cookie, no tracker, no request to any other server. There is therefore no pupil data on this site, and there will not be: it would run against the doctrine of the association.

Yes. The licence allows redistribution, including on a closed platform. Keep the ODERSA credit and the link to the licence on the document itself, so the pupil knows where it comes from.

The worked answers are part of the book, not a reserved extra. What exactly each title will carry in the way of teaching apparatus will be settled with that title, and written in its colophon.

Yes, for pages you have already visited: the site installs itself in the browser and serves itself again when the network is missing. That statement is not an intention: it is proven at every release by a program that switches the server off, checks that the port refuses connections, then requires every language to serve itself with its stylesheet and its fonts.

Yes, on browsers that offer it: the site is installable and then opens in its own window. It is not an app to fetch from a store, and nothing more runs on your device.

Yes, entirely, and it is verified at every release with scripts switched off: the navigation stays reachable, the full menu stays unfolded, and the content is there. Only the settings panel disappears, because a control that does not respond is worse than a control that is absent.

The house is born in the seven languages of the association: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali and simplified Chinese. The number of languages actually built is shown on this site and counted at build time, never written by hand.

No. Each language is written natively, with its own typography, its own quotation marks and its own turns of phrase, and a program refuses to release a language in which a single string has been left identical to the French without a written reason.

Because the readership of a house of openly licensed textbooks is worldwide from day one: a visitor whose language matches none of ours is more likely to read English than French. French remains the reference language of the editorial work.

Yes, layout included: the stylesheet is written in logical properties, the icons that carry direction are mirrored, and the side panel enters from the other edge. It is not a translation dropped onto a left-to-right design.

That is what the house intends, and it is not built yet. The PDF production chain belongs to the project of the first book, and it will be written with it. As long as it does not exist, this site shows no PDF download button: announcing a format you do not serve is the only thing worse than not serving it.

Yes, and here they are rather than a silence: the format of the editable source files, the exact contents of the teaching apparatus, the order of the titles after the first one, and the question of an ISBN. Each will be settled with a real book, and written here the day it is decided.