The Coming Wave of Affordable Textbooks
At the Charleston conference this year, a panel on the library’s role in providing affordable textbooks showed the way to great savings and innovation in instructional materials.
At the Charleston conference this year, a panel on the library’s role in providing affordable textbooks showed the way to great savings and innovation in instructional materials.
Is there a role for a curated, remixing approach to developing next generation textbooks. Robert Harington investigates the role of curated open textbooks in teaching today’s students, looking at some of the available tools, the way in which instructors utilize such tools, and issues around fair use of content.
Has the time come for academic libraries to start thinking seriously about providing textbooks to their student patrons? A few are already doing so–why not more?
Expectations of free content are entrenched, but artists, authors, and publishers are all hurting because of it. The basic problem? It’s leading to a lack of trust in the future.
Sci-Hub sets a reprehensible example, but publishers cannot be content simply to stamp out such services. In order to evolve the industry into the future, publishers have to provide services that make Sci-Hub and its ilk seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to use.
Amazon is reportedly poised to get into the open educational resources game. This could be huge, and not just for the most obvious reasons.
Boundless Textbooks used to offer free alternatives to popular and expensive college texts, using information available on the open Web. Then came the inevitable lawsuit, and an out-of-court settlement. What does the Boundless program look like now?
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post on the challenges and the strategies for moving textbooks into the digital era.
The college textbook business is being disrupted, but not by outsiders. The publishers themselves are restructuring the industry. One consequence of this may be diminished prerogatives for instructors in their choice of classroom texts.
Purchasing a college textbook can be a very expensive proposition. Why are these textbooks so expensive? The reason lies in the very structure of the industry, where instructors make decisions they don’t have to pay for.
There are many new companies seeking to disrupt the college textbook model. Here is a taxonomy of the strategies, with some comments on the likelihood of their being adopted.