I'd be curious to know if some of our contributors and readers would be interested in collaborating with me on creating an open online textbook in moral theory. Open source textbooks hold promise in reducing costs to students and making scholarly knowledge more publicly available. There are quite a lot of open resources in philosophy (particularly in logic, it seems) but not a high quality textbook on normative moral theory. I'll admit to not knowing all that much about some of the likely technical issues (the design and layout, how best to disseminate such works, etc.) we would face, but my thought is that a team of 3-5 with the right technical knowhow, a strong publishing history in moral theory, and some pedagogical flair could create a great resource.
Please contact me if you're interested – thanks!
Dear Michael
I hope you are well and this sounds like a great idea. Just one suggestion that might reduce your workload with the project.
There are already open source book publishers such as Open Book Publishers:
http://www.openbookpublishers.com/
who already publish quality books in philosophy. I think they might be able to do quite a bit of the work for you in terms of the professional design, lay-out, hosting the book online, the editorial process, and so on.
They also seem to provide free online access to their books and free downloads too (and cheapish paper and ebook versions as well). I’m sure there are other alternatives as well – I’ve only refereed for this press once and that experience was very good. In any case, writing the book for an open source publisher like this would reduce the workload probably considerably and it would still help you to achieve the very admirable goals in terms of serving students and the profession as a whole.