California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

bcrowell writes "Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure, state senator Darrell Steinberg has a new idea for the state-subsidized publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials seem positive. It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home. At the symposium where the results of the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell lots of hardware to schools."

Comments

Re:Don't mess with the publishing industry, man

[Baloroth]

Except when you change a handful of diagrams and re-order a few chapters to produce a new edition of a text-book, your editing costs go towards zero, and even with the relatively few buyers, profits are incredible. Plus, you completely eliminate the second hand-market. This is routine practice for college (and to a lesser degree high-school) textbooks.