Thoughts about the Open Textbook Cost Savings Calculator

"In our Utah Open Textbooks Project we’ve been closely monitoring the costs of deploying open textbooks to see if / how / when they can be less expensive than traditional textbooks. It turns out there are many, many ways to use open textbooks that are actually more expensive than traditional textbooks. We’ve learned several lessons this past year about what contributes to costs, where and how to print, etc. Today we’ve released the first version of a calculator that provides an interactive way to explore the best case scenario under a very specific assumption – that you want to provide a printed book to every student...."