Online Textbooks Tell Real Textbooks to Shut Up

Posted on July 10, 2008
Filed Under Do Everything Better, News | By Lucas Kavner

Despite Mr. Baumgarten’s recent post about a major lawsuit being filed against one of these online textbook companies, USA Today reports that online textbooks may finally be seeing the light in a big way. And there ain’t no way USA Today can ever be wrong about anything… as we’ve learned…in life. It seems thousands of college students and faculty have already begun using “open textbooks” — “free textbooks available online that allow users to download, customize, and print any part of the text” — as an alternative, and hard copies of these open textbooks have become available on some sites for as little as $10. After the jump, some jarring facts from the USA Today article regarding textbook prices.

Textbook prices have outpaced inflation 2 to 1 in the past two decades…They account for 26% of tuition and fees at four-year public universities and nearly three-quarters of costs at community colleges, the Government Accountability Office says.

A campaign called “Make Textbooks Affordable” is pushing a petition, which already has 1,200 signatures from faculty all across the nation, encouraging more faculty to use these open textbooks in their classes.

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