The End of $200 Textbooks?
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
wohnai/flickr
The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks.
I know that as a society we’re probably in the infancy of this movement to digitize textbooks and in a variety of ways, bring down the costs of textbooks to students. I don’t understand how they deal with fees to the writers of textbooks, but Washington State has created a way to access collections of textbooks as well as other educational materials- mostly for free. Â Apparently the most a school can charge for these is $30 per student.
They’ve begun with eighty-one of the state’s most popular general education and pre-college classes taken. Â These are open licenses, which means that they’re available to other colleges and universities and anyone else who wants to give them a try.
I’ve already been on the site and looked at some US History text. It’s a pretty easy sign-in process and once I was looking over a chapter, and since I was using my Safari browser, it was easy to highlight, right-click and have my computer read it to me (if I was tired or dyslexic or had another learning disability).