Open Source Textbooks

Anyone who has spent more than a semester or two at college knows the problem: What do you do with those hundred dollar textbooks when the course is over? No one really wants to hold on to Principles of Endocrinology, Vol. 3 or Introduction to German Grammar.

If an updated edition hasn't come out, you can resell them to the campus bookstore for about 1/3 of what you originally paid. Forums on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, along with sites like OpenPosting.com, have made it easier for students to resell textbooks directly to other students, for somewhat more money, and Amazon and Half.com can let you save money from the start, but in the end, those textbooks are definitely gonna cost you.

That's where ebooks and open source textbooks come in. Users of Google are probably familiar with Google Books and Google Scholar, searchable databases of popular fiction and non-fiction books, as well as textbooks and academic articles. Many of these books, like those at Project Gutenberg or The Internet Public Library, can be read in full for free. Your college or university probably also has a subscription to JSTOR and other online academic journal archives, which makes it easy to do most of your research (and some of your required reading) without leaving your dorm room.

Open source textbooks are free, collaboratively-built textbooks that can be edited by the professor and annotated by the student, have become more and more popular. Companies like Flat World Knowledge, founded by Jeff Shelstad and Eric Frank, two former print textbook executives, and CourseSmart, along with MIT's OpenCourseWare, and the California Open Source Textbook Project, are providing thousands of free online textbooks, as well as additional educational materials, including worksheets and practice exams, as well as video lectures.

In late August, the L.A. Times reported on a Caltech economics professor, R. Preston McAfee, who back in 2007 wrote a free open source introductory economics textbook which has since been used at both Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, as well as several other colleges. Though McAfee is the first to acknowledge that open source textbooks have a long way to go, many colleges are moving in the right direction, including Rice University, California State University, and the aforementioned MIT. Even Wikipedia has set up an online site of user edited open source books. WikiBooks, since 2003, has grown to include more than 32,000 open source textbooks. If McAfee is right, a move by California community colleges next year to include both open source and traditional print textbooks on the course syllabus, if approved, could be just the kick the industry needs.

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