Open textbooks can free us from our woes » The Sheaf - The University of Saskatchewan Newspaper Since 1912

"With tuition once again on the rise, university students are dragging their feet to the bookstore to empty their wallets on textbooks, with seemingly no salvation in sight — except maybe the development of an online textbook source. Standing in a ridiculously long line at the bookstore really makes a person contemplate a solution to the expensive textbook plague — the most common suggestion being, of course, that textbooks should just be free. I mean, we already pay tuition and student fees, so why not? We all know free textbooks will never happen. The markets are too big; corporations are too greedy. So the next best solution is the open textbooks system, in which textbooks are available to students and instructors through a preferably free online database. This system is already being used in universities across British Columbia and is gaining momentum at the University of Calgary, among others. I can already hear the complaints: why does everything have to be on the Internet? Who’s going to put together this database? What about copyright laws? What about us, as students? The open textbook model would be less expensive than purchasing physical copies of textbooks, more ecologically friendly and just altogether convenient for so many people ..."