jfunk46360

August 02, 2010 at 10:10am

I am a high school teacher.  High school students are required to pay book rental, but many families can not pay or choose not to pay.  That puts the burden back on the local school district.  I would like to see open source textbooks succeed simply because of the poor quality of published books.  I get tired of texbook companies tweaking the books slightly, slapping a new cover on the front, raising the edition number another notch, and changing a mint for the result.  Textbook companies have been gobbling each other up in recent years and the lack of competition shows in the poor quality of their books.

silentrob187

August 02, 2010 at 9:34am

As a college teacher this will help some, but it will not replace texts. It takes time to put this info together (lots of time) and there is very little prestige attached to it.  So if there is no money in it people will simply stop writing new texts, a must for science.  What you get for free will be exactly that--a free effort.  Of course for some intro classes this doesn't matter much, but for other classes it does.  I think the custom texts being pushed by publishers is the real future (i.e. you choose which chapters you want).

espalmer

August 02, 2010 at 6:27am

As a techie this news is a bit old, but exciting none the less. As a teacher in an inner city high school I highly doubt this will work. Over 1/2 my kids do not have a computer at home, if they do 1/2 of them do not have access to the internet. Most use their cellphones for IM and twitting.

Also this overlooks the fact why the publishers make testbooks....$$$$$$. If it is free there goes their business model. Perhaps the cost could be cut to districts that "subscribe" to the online services. The trees would love less hard copies ;)