[ivansavz]

Aside: I misinterpreted the title as saying "applying game theory to OER textbooks" and imagined a paper discussing the incentives/payouts for creators of educational content like textbooks.

Some possible moves:

     - Write for a mainstream publisher (payout: ~5% royalties, reach: medium)
     - Self publish commercially (payout: 45%+ royalties from createspace/lulu, reach: small)
     - Release for free as OER under public domain / CC0 (no payout, reach: broad)

I'm fascinated by the interplay between the for-money publishing business and the idea of open source content, and would really love to see a paper studying this subject. Some concrete questions: 1. If an author is interested in maximizing total payout, should she write for a mainstream publisher or self-publish? 2. If an author is interested in most educational impact (maximize the number of readers), should she pursue a one of the commercial routes (publish or self-publish) or release the book as public domain?

The answer to 2. is not obvious: some of the best textbooks I know are free (GFDL, CC *, or public domain because old), but somehow they don't get the respect they deserve because people have the perception of "free" as being somehow inferior quality. People think, if the book really was any good, surely you'd have to pay for it?

Even more interesting is to consider the game theoretic aspects of multiple authors/contributors. Why are software projects on githun with hundreds of collaborators the norm, but textbooks project limited to one or few main authors?