Several US projects launched this autums are expanding the availability of free electronic textbooks using open educational resources (OER), as commercial publishers scramble to make more of their own titles available digitally.
The activity comes in response to the mounting cost of textbooks — up 812 percent since 1978, much faster than even tuition fees, according to the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “A lot of students don’t buy books,” says Richard Baraniuk, professor of engineering at Rice University in Houston and founding director of OpenStax College, an OER project based there. “They know they’re not going to do as well in their courses, but they still choose not to buy (prescribed) books because they’re too expensive.”
Impatient for publishers to rein in costs, Lynn University in Florida has provided tablets to all incoming students this term and said it will eliminate printed textbooks in core classes by next year. Pushed by student associations, the university system of Maryland is letting academics experiment with free OER textbooks in introductory courses. And several start-ups, eyeing a US textbook market worth more than $12 billion (Rs.73,254 crore), are promoting cheap alternatives created from OER content.
Publishers are pushing back in unexpected ways. Many now offer cheaper e-versions of their textbooks (online products now account for 27 percent of the US industry). Global publisher Pearson has also created a cloud-based service which provides access to free OER content alongside its titles, allowing scholars to assemble their own course materials from both sources. And a group of publishers has collectively made its e-titles available through a service called CourseSmart.
But although these trends have been building for a few years, the digitisation of textbooks has not taken off as fast as other technological advances in the academy. For one thing, staff and students have been surprisingly reluctant to abandon print. Nearly 80 percent of students surveyed by the National Association of College Stores say they prefer print to e-books, and academics assign digital texts in only 14 percent of study programmes.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)