...Although I retired in 2000 and no longer need to select texts, I have been fascinated by recent reports that individual books now commonly cost more than $100 and have become a major burden on today's financially strapped students. In fact, the education committee of the House of Representatives has just proposed new requirements for publishers and colleges, in an attempt to bring prices down (The Chronicle, January 31)....
The production of standard textbooks involves two kinds of costs: organizing and writing the material contained in the text; and printing, distributing, and marketing it. All of those costs are avoidable today....
To start with the second group of costs, it is now possible to put the content of a text on a Web site very inexpensively. If the owner of the content gives permission to copy it, link to it, and even reprint it at no or little charge, putting it online is nearly as good as printing it up as a physical book and distributing copies to every library and bookstore on the planet. Any student who has access to the Internet can read and study an online text without paying anything, and can print or copy key passages into a file that is the equivalent of handwritten notes. And he or she can print a whole copy for about 5 cents a page, far less than the cost of a bound book.
Academic publications, including scholarly journals and publications like The Chronicle, could encourage and legitimize such texts....
For the first group of costs, naturally, writing a textbook is labor intensive and requires a great deal of skill. But that is also true of writing an encyclopedia, and over the past half-dozen years, Wikipedia has put together an outstanding reference work without paying any of its writers anything....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
