Should College Textbooks be Available for Free Online?
Posted on October 16, 2009 by Ken Udas
Well, who is going to say no to ‘free.’ Maybe for starters, the authors of educational texts may have an issue with it, but maybe not. More likely than not it will be traditional publishers. According to this recent article in the Edmonton Journal, most professors write texts for fame and a sense of contribution to their discipline, versus fortune and most earn very little on textbooks anyway. The article also asserts that since professors are being paid for their research and time, they could perhaps forgo charging for their book! Um… contrary opinions anyone? After all, most authors are not directly compensated for the articles they publish in academic journals, while still signing away their intellectual property to, in most cases, a for-profit company.
But my purpose in bringing this article to light here isn’t necessarily to ignite a ‘free versus paid’ debate over college textbooks. Instead, it is to note an interesting story that is mentioned in the article about preferences for purchased texts or the very same text offered fee free online. What is amazing about the story is not so much that learners are comfortable with downloading free textbooks, but that making them available seems to be a growing trend and that business and service models are developing outside of traditional publishing.
As the article notes, Athabasca University professor Terry Anderson wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. It was made available, for a price, in a hard copy version and free via an online version. Here’s what happened:
His first edition, self-published in 2004, sold 450 hard copies and got 7,500 downloads… The second edition, offered a year ago through the Athabasca University Press, has already sold 404 hard copies and got 22,000 downloads.
That’s under 1,000 traditional copies and nearly 30,000 the new-fashioned way. Professor Anderson says the online volume his book has achieved as well as his novel way of offering it has landed him some opportunities he might not otherwise have had. And, while the article doesn’t say this, isn’t it true about 30,000 individuals have read a book they might otherwise never have seen? Kudos to Terry, and to AU Press for thinking differently and making a difference!
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- A Contemporary Discourse on Free, Open Source, Online Texts vs. the Alternatives
- Distance Learning and the ‘Right’ to an Education
- Textbooks May Be So Yesterday, But Tomorrow Doesn’t Come Cheap
- Rent a Textbook, Plant a Tree?
- Distance Learning and the Digital Library
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Interesting topic - I wrote about it on the same day you did. My take on it was this: professors don’t get much for publishing academic textbooks, and textbooks are very expensive (think of introductory texts to physics, calculus, chem, and so on). What do faculty get out of writing a text? Reputation.
The same can be accomplished by following the model employed by Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Offer the text free online, charge for a printed version - your students will thank you for it, and chances are more people will see your book.
As a graduate student I could not afford all my textbooks and had to decide between books that I could afford vs the ones I needed to borrow. So the idea of free online books is very appealing and something that makes sense. Also a great point that the problem is more with the publishing process than the authors who want to get their material published. But, if I maybe so bold, we may need to add the teaching process in this mix as well. It’s the teachers who decide the syllabus, and choose which textbooks are needed vs which ones are obsolete. Most of the modern theories ranging from Basic Math to Psychology to Nuclear Physics are available for free online, and instead of textbooks the syllabus could just be a number of links. Access to up-to-date online news from several small sources made the big newspaper companies obsolete.
@ Apostolos K: Thank you for your insights. I think that you are correct. If faculty are motivated by reputation and that is supported a reward system, the Theory and Practice of Online Learning model could work quite well. Along these lines, it might be worth considering Flat World Knowledge http://www.flatworldknowledge.com, which provides a robust support and economic model for authors, faculty, and students that supports remixing content and assigning text book content at a pretty fine level of granularity. It is worth noting that the books on Flat World are licensed to allow for remixing/derivative works (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).
Clearly this model challenges traditional thinking in the textbook publishing industry while providing a venue for faculty to pick and choose from what they like in a variety of texts while also publishing a few chapters of their own where they think there are gaps, providing a lot of flexibility and taking advantage of the unique insights of the professor. In addition, students can read from the site for free and print for very low costs. In fact, from what I can tell, if the student has access to free printing, it would be less expensive to purchase and print chapters than photocopying.
I think though it is important to recognize how important the licensing is. Without the ability to create derivative works and the “share alike” restriction, this would be little more than a static repository – and there are plenty of those.
What do you think and are there other models that you like?
@Anonymous: I am with you 100% on this. I think that many of the resources that faculty and learning designers decide to use has relatively specific pedagogical intent. This is what you should expect from your professor – unique ways of looking at a field of study and creative ways of facilitating learning. Part of the solution/challenge is finding affordable content that can be used to support specific learning objectives and teaching techniques.
One of the issues that you touched on is that faculty, the university… (whoever selects the materials), does not have to shoulder the financial burden of those decisions, so can be less mindful of the costs. Now, if a University had a standard course description in their virtual catalog which included total costs of learning materials, that might make the costs more obvious to whoever is responsible for assigning the content.
As an aside, it is worth noting that the textbook cost issue has not gone unnoticed (you have advocates). Affordable textbooks are part of U.S. PIRG’s http://www.uspirg.org/higher-education/affordable-textbooks “Affordable Higher Education” agenda. I have met Nicole Allen, while she served as PIRG’s Textbook Advocate, at the 2008 OpenEd meeting. She is definitely looking at this issue very holistically and connecting it with the larger open education and open educational resources dialogue.
Folks,
Some of you may know me as a semi-regular contributor last year. I’ve had a few months of knee placement absence, followed by a bit of kidney surgery. But I’m feeling good and relish my return to online education. (Classroom teaching would still be a bit difficult.)
My comment on the free textbook controversy is simple. Our campus libraries have begun offering textbooks and all manner of bibliographs — free, so to speak, for students. But not free for the the Libraries or the university. I’ve begun using free books as often as I can. Most students appreciate it, especially overseas students who have less access to assigned books.
Textbook publishers love e books. No ink, paper, printing, moving books to dealers and libraries. Professors don’t know the difference financially, except they may get broader exposure and more royalties.
So what’s the problem? Many professors simply are not familiar with the e publications or how to access them. Some professors simply don’t like e books which is fine, but they should offer students a choice. I predict that 2010 will be the year that ebooks become as common as traditional paper versions. The sudden appearance of seven e readers might be a hint to this sea change. Kindle has company. Oh, did I mention that University Libraries don’t even need e readers? The traditional laptop will do just fine.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Art