Free Textbooks Shaking Up Higher Education

“... a new type of textbook is threatening to disrupt a $4.5 billion industry that has so far avoided the media upheavals experienced in music, movies and trade publications. Open-source textbooks, free for students to use and for professors to modify, are being developed by more companies and adopted in more classrooms. They may work hand-in-hand with the rise in free online courses to revolutionize the way we view—and pay for—higher education... Estimates of how much students spend on textbooks in a given year vary widely, but most colleges’ financial aid websites peg the cost at about $1,000. Baraniuk thinks that cost should be reduced to zero. He’s been part of the open-source educational movement since 1999, when he grew frustrated with the book he was using in his electrical engineering class. He considered writing a book himself but had an epiphany as he learned more about the open-source operating system Linux. ‘I realized that we could take the same ideas–namely, modularity…and open-sourcedness, making it free and remixable–and apply that not just to software but to textbooks.’ Now he’s the director of OpenStax College, a nonprofit organization that is working to develop 25 college textbooks for introductory-level courses. With the backing of Rice University, OpenStax is bringing a big-name pedigree to the textbook market. ‘There are a lot of open, free textbook projects out there, but the quality has been uneven,’ Baraniuk says. ‘What college instructors need is the whole package. They need the textbook, the homework system, the PowerPoint slides, the test bank.’ OpenStax promises to offer this ‘whole package’ in every subject from Spanish to microbiology. Two of its books, College Physics and Introduction to Sociology, have already been published and will be used by a few thousand students this semester. Anyone can access an online version of the texts, or download them in PDF and ebook formats for mobile devices. Students can also order a color print edition, with prices ranging from $30 to $50. OpenStax is not alone in this emerging textbook market. Flat World Knowledge has been publishing open textbooks since 2007, and will be serving around 200,000 students this fall with dozens of textbook offerings. Both companies have all their books peer reviewed, as is standard with traditionally published textbooks. But creating a quality textbook costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which presents the first and greatest challenge in giving away course materials. Right now OpenStax books, some of which are adapted from out-of-print texts, are funded through philanthropy. To create its first five books, OpenStax raised more than $5 million from Rice University and groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Baraniuk thinks OpenStax can become self-sustaining. Again borrowing from Linux, he envisions OpenStax being a free, open-source platform around which companies would build content that students pay for, like study aids and homework sets. OpenStax would then get a cut of the revenues. The organization is partnering with web-based educational companies like WebAssign to develop the supplemental content that it hopes will pay the bills. Flat World, a for-profit company, already operates on a similar model. While the web-based versions of Flat World’s books are free, students can also buy study aids like flash cards for $20, a black-and-white print version of a text for $40, or an all-access “digital pass” that includes ebook and sometimes audiobook formats for $35. ‘We don’t really care how the student experiences our content,’ Flat World CEO Jeff Shelstad says. ‘Of course we want them to pay, but we also are battling the access and affordability issues, so we think letting them in free is good for business and good for the world.’ Though the company would not disclose its finances, Shelstad says 40% of the students who use a Flat World text end up buying something, most of them spending at least $35. Flat World is also crafting relationships with college administrators. The company inked a deal to distribute Flat World texts in courses throughout the university system of Ohio last year and is providing the textbooks for some of the courses in MIT’s free OpenCourseWare initiative...”