The publishing house
A publishing house is judged on what it refuses to publish. Here are the decisions that hold it, with their dates.
Who publishes
This publishing house belongs to ODERSA, a French non-profit association under the 1901 Act. Its registration numbers and its address are printed at the foot of every page on this site, and the association publishes several other free educational resources besides this one.
The Library is its publishing house: it does one thing, publish complete teaching textbooks under an open licence, and it is judged on that one thing. The association does not expect a thick catalogue from it, but works about which one can say, one by one, who wrote them, who checked them, when, and what anyone may do with them.
It belongs to the Knowledge programme of the association, which gathers everything to do with access to knowledge. That link is printed in the strip at the top of every page, above the content.
The record of decisions
What the association settled, and when. A decision without a date is a decision that can be rewritten afterwards.
The house is born in seven languages, and its brief is signed
The association settles the scope of its publishing house: complete textbooks, free of charge, no account, openly licensed, published in the seven languages it serves, and no book displayed before it exists.
The same day, the licensing rule is settled, and it is the most structural decision of all: content under CC BY 4.0, editorial design reserved to the association. The exception is named in the brief rather than left to interpretation.
The fifty-page floor, and crossed checking made compulsory
A whole book is worth a dedicated project, never a shared one, and fifty pages at the very least: below that, a full progression with its exercises does not hold, and the work becomes a worksheet again.
Crossed checking becomes an obligation, language by language: nobody proofreads their own text. And every book will carry its colophon and its caveat about mistakes, with an address for reporting them, in each of its languages.
The visual direction is settled on the matter of the book
The site is bound: its footer is a board of dark cloth, every page head hangs from a vertical rule the way a page hangs from its sewing, the cards are leaves laid one on another, and the settings button is a bookmark.
Binding green is the single accent. The colour of the home programme, a golden ochre, is honoured through the name shown in the identity strip rather than through the palette: a second accent is forbidden in this association, and the ruling is written into the program that checks the colours, so that it cannot be undone by inattention.
The positioning is corrected by the facts
A check carried out online, language by language, showed that complete openly licensed textbooks already exist in French and in Spanish, and not only in English. The house rewrote what it says about itself rather than keeping a flattering formula that was wrong.
The real gap, on the other hand, is confirmed: wherever a state hands out a textbook for free, it almost always forbids reprinting it, and in the languages this association serves most, no complete openly licensed textbook can be found. The sources for that finding are on the sources page, with their addresses.
The scope, plainly. A house that does not write down its limits ends up crossing them without noticing.
| What it is about | Status | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Complete textbooks under an open licence | The very object of this house | Fifty pages at the very least, crossed checking, a dated colophon, content under CC BY 4.0. |
| Reading online and downloading | Planned with the first book | A textbook that will not print does not reach a classroom without screens. |
| Worksheets and short documents | Out of scope | They have a place at the association, but not under the name of a book: without a progression it is not a textbook. |
| Accounts, saved progress, dashboards | Never | No data is collected, and an account would be the first toll gate. |
| Sales, subscriptions, anything in return | Never | The statutes of the association forbid it, and a paid textbook is not an open textbook. |
| A house blog | Outside the current scope | The place is reserved in the architecture of the site, and nothing is written before there is something to say. |
An open licence turns this funding into a common good: reusable by any organisation, without asking our permission.