We Could Save Students a Billion Dollars on Textbooks | Ethan Senack

" ... One thing is clear: the current textbook market doesn't deliver the educational opportunity it can and should. That's why the Student PIRGs recently released a report on an alternative textbook model that could revolutionize the industry and save students a ton of money at the same time. The model is open textbooks -- faculty-written, peer-reviewed textbooks that are published under an open license - meaning that they are available to the public free online, free to download, and hard copies cost on $10-$40. Our report, "Open Textbooks: The Billion-Dollar Solution," analyzes data from five pilot programs at universities around the country that encourage faculty to replace the traditional textbook they use to teach with an open-licensed textbook. Based on the data from these programs, the report concludes that when a student has their traditional, introductory-level textbook replaced with an open textbook, they save $128 on average per course. Using that average, if every full-time undergraduate had just one of their traditional textbooks replaced with an open textbook each year, it could save students nationally almost $1.5 billion in textbook costs. It's worth noting that's a conservative estimate. Just using OpenStax's (an open-textbook publisher based at Rice University) 15 textbooks, we could replace more than 10 million traditional textbooks and generate a billion dollars in student savings. That's not to mention the other 140 open textbooks listed in the Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota ..."