OSU Libraries Offer Open Access Etextbooks to Students

Oregon State University (OSU) is helping faculty produce their own open access textbooks for courses. The university press, an arm of the OSU libraries, is starting work on a series of open access e-textbooks that officials hope will ease the rising textbook costs that are a consistent cause of student complaints. To make the etextbook program work, the library and press are partnering with OSU’s Ecampus program, which administers distance and online learning programs for the college. OSU library director Faye Chadwell, whose background is in collections management, said the collaboration gives libraries a new way to help students with the cost of textbooks, and one that is meaningful compared to offering books on reserve, a “drop in the bucket” solution that she said doesn’t scale effectively to meet demand ... Depending on the subject, students could save anywhere from $50 to $250 by using an open access etextbook instead of a traditional print one. Chadwell also pointed out that the new texts are designed with modularity in mind, noting that students are regularly required to purchase textbooks for a course only to learn they will only read a chapter or two during the class.  To bring the project to fruition, Chadwell and the OSU library took advantage of the tech savvy of their partners in the Ecampus program to take advantage of the electronic format to make these new textbooks more than just traditional tomes. The ebook format not only gave OSU a chance to make ebooks that were well suited for students in the university’s distance learning programs, but also let them go beyond simply text and words, bringing to bear interactive elements.  As a proof of concept, the collaboration started with an existing textbook, OSU geology professor Robert S. Yeats’ Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest. Yeats, who was already working on an update to the book, allowed OSU press and Ecampus to use the book as a prototype for the program, expanding on the content and making it more interactive ..."