A Real Solution to High Textbook Prices

This week I read about a piece of legislation sure to be a hit with my fellow students: Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has introduced the Open College Textbook Act, which would provide competitive grants to create open college textbooks. Although Durbin calls for the textbooks to be "freely" available, it seems like there may be a bit of confusion over whether these textbooks are open in the sense of open source software (free to modify and re-distribute) or whether they are truly free.

Durbin's plan avoids the pitfalls of Wikipedia and other similar open sites (which many college students use anyways) by providing for a review process of the material. In addition, Durbin is seeking to bypass the inflated prices we have seen recently by textbook publishers who bundle software and online portions to their textbooks. Personally, these addons often seemed like nothing more than an additional investment in time that students would have to take, instead of enrichment. Often, addons such as CD-ROMs are just ways for publishers to save money, by including PDF answer keys and similar content that could just as easily live online.

There are already free textbooks for basic subject such as physics and calculus online, freely accessible to students and the public alike. Since these subjects are well-established and not likely to change any time soon (you could just as easily teach yourself how to find derivatives with a textbook from the 1960s as from 2009) this is the right approach for these topics. Also, Durbin's approach follows other recent projects such as MIT's Open Courseware that make class materials available to anyone online. I can even think of one class here at the iSchool that has no textbook but instead pointers to free online tutorials that one can use to study HTML and PHP.

The question with these free content projects often falls down to "who's going to pay for it?" Since these are grant-funded textbooks, that problem has been solved, as long as the grants don't dry up. Universities seem to be of two minds on this topic: either they gladly make their course material available (as in the MIT case) or are worried about losing their intellectual property by putting the materials online. In addition, professors who have developed custom coursework often are in a bind because the university has rights to their own material, and they don't want to see it stolen and reused at other universities. Anyone whose professor has put passwords on downloadable course lecture notes will be familiar with this problem. This open solution could bypass the problem for professors: it's owned by no one (or everyone?) and is freely reusable.

The open access approach seems to be a nice step away from the consumer mentality that seems to plague current college students.Students "shop" for courses and professors and evaluate courses as if they are consumer products. See this article by Leah Schweitzer for a better analysis of this subject. In a way, education is a high-priced consumer good, but it is the work that students put in, in collaboration with professors, TAs and fellow students that can raise it above a passive experience. We want to believe that the halls of academia are more noble and lofty than the ITT Tech outlet in the local strip mall. Now, students with enough determination could in fact bypass the university and teach themselves with open course material.

I think this bill is a step in the right direction. Universities would have the chance to distinguish themselves in the level of personal service and creative projects they provide to students while still using the same materials as other schools. If academic papers and basic encyclopedias are available through database subscriptions at almost every college, there's no reason why basic textbooks shouldn't be available to everyone online. It would definitely make looking up the definition of Simple Harmonic Motion at 3AM easier right before that exam, without giving blind trust to Wikipedia.