This piece from the Atlantic indicates that California legislature and gov have signed two laws that will subsidize the cost of textbooks for lower-division courses:
The new legislation encompasses two bills: One, a proposal for the state to fund 50 open-source digital textbooks, targeted to lower-division courses, which will be produced by California’s universities. (Students will be able to download these books for free or pay $20 for hard copies.) The other bill is a proposal to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host those books.
Having written a couple of textbooks myself, my first questions was – how much would the state pay? I assume this would be a summer project. Then there are the other costs – will the state hire editors, photographers, pay for copyright permissions? Who will determine if the products generated are “competitive”? Will authors “bid” for the opportunity? How will experienced authors view this “opportunity”? Will the “open source” agreement extend to other states?
According to one source (Try News360 for multiple takes on this story), The law requires that the digital titles be protected under Creative Commons licenses, which means they can be accessed and used by teachers or students outside of California. Hmm.. – maybe I will be able to assign a free Intro to Psychology text in the near future.
I think this is an interesting experiment, but would think the state might have made the commitment to a smaller number of projects to see how things go. The assumption here is that market forces have not encouraged less expensive textbooks and this is one of those situations in which the government can do a better job. Do you really thing that publishing companies have not considered digital books (see MindShift blog post)?