Free Textbooks Internet Library

The Economics of College Textbooks
Supply
Publishers create paper books to explain material requested by teachers. Colleges sell to students at a 33% markup making a profit or sell bookstore rights to a national chain for instant profit and less management responsibility.
Demand
Students need something to study.
Teachers need material to teach and help developing and grading tests
The Used Textbook Market
More than ten years ago an extensive used textbook industry developed and student participants saved money.

Publishers Fight Back causing much higher prices
The used textbook market cut into publisher profit margins. Their response was more frequent edition changes. This, they hoped, would make textbooks indispensable. In courses where homework problems were an integral part of the textbook, problems were changed making used textbooks less useful. The added material increase printing cost, and caused numerous mistakes making the books less useful. Special publisher programs like the Thomson - Service Plus - Rewards and ThomsonNOW | Online learning and course management from Thomson ... gave students an e-book option for about 60% of the cost of paper and allows teacher to automatically make a syllabus, tests, grades, and students can check grades. Also, according to the company, material to make learning easier was provided.
The bottom line
Changes made by publishers increase production cost meaning prices had to go up at a faster rate to maintain profit margins.

Anecdotal Information gathered over thirty-five years of teaching and ten years of selling books from the Quick Notes Learning System series to about ten college bookstores.

If one hundred students sign up for a class, the bookstore orders about seventy books, returns ten books, buys back 40 books of which 30 look like new.

From a teacher's standpoint, the test bank is the most important ingredient.
Publishers make the testing process easier with test banks which can be taken and graded by a machine. The average professor teaches four classes per term with a total of 100 to 1,000 students. Final exam are given over a short period with grades due a few days after the exam period. The Professor, using the publishers test bank, selects questions and prints the multiple choice test and answer sheet. A machine is used to grade the test. Bells and whistles like a grade distribution and test results by question are interesting, but superfluous.

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Development Sites with Completed Textbooks
eduCommons will help you develop and manage an open access collection of course materials.
Global Text Project, originated by Dr. Richard Watson at the University of Georgia.
OpenTextBook.org is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD).
FlexBooks has HS science, math, engineering, and technology textbooks
Wikibooks - offers over 30,000 open-content textbooks.
Flat World Knowledge is a commercial digital-textbook publisher offering free open textbooks.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.
The Free Textbook Project help in creating and sharing educational materials.

Textbook Development Sites with helpful textbook materials
The Orange Grove
CK-12 Foundation provides learning segments that can be combined into books.
Connexions, from Rice University "... is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help, authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. View an in-depth introduction to Connexions in the TED2006 presentation by Connexions Founder Richard Baraniuk."
California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) is a collaborative, public/private undertaking. It has been created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California.
Open Educational Resources Commons is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, fro
m K-12 through college, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone.
Open of Course is a multilingual community portal for free online courses and tutorials.
TED2006 an in-depth introduction to Connexions presentation by its founder Richard Baraniuk.
Open Educational Resources (OER) Index
Open Education Resource Center for California provides support for community college educators.

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Free Textbooks Adoption Plan
1) Students, working through an existing student group--student senate, economics club, business club, would form a committee.
2) Choose a basic course (Accounting, Economics, Statistics, Botany), where material tested is very generic.
3) The appropriate department would be asked to work with the committee in choosing an appropriate free textbook and tying the syllabus to the free textbook. In courses with extensive reading, the department would tie the reading list to one or two of the free sources. Where tests consist of problems, the department would choose a free textbook that has similar problems. Perhaps a faculty member could use their sabbatical to develop materials.
4) Open Textbook Adoption by Judy Baker provides five steps for teachers wanting to adopt open textbooks.
5) Have the department create a department wide testing and grading mechanism. Once this is accomplished, teachers will not be dependent on publishers for this material and free e-textbooks can replace costly paper textbooks.
6) Schools should develop a Tech-based, Activity-driven educational system centered on student activity rather than lectures.
Open Textbook Testimonial, Erik Christensen of South Florida Community College. Professors Providing Free Internet Textbook Alternatives For Their Students

Improving Free/Open Textbooks
1) Internet sites collecting materials should perform a rationing function separating interesting subject matter from actual textbooks. For example Connexions correctly calls its material a collection of small "knowledge chunks". Too many sites do not separate textbooks from chunks.
2) Sites too often go for quantity rather than quality.
3) Someone must develop easy to use testing materials currently provided by publishers. For examples Sofia course material provides tests along with course notes and is ready to go while Wikibooks is developing some interesting material but no testing material is provided.
4) Studies show that students complain about costs but are slow to move to alternatives. A way must be found to use student inputs in the development of free Internet based textbooks.
5) Educational Ideas From Economists
Please E-mail us with suggestions on rectifying this problem. Put Student Acceptance in the Subject box.

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Interesting Free Textbook Ideas

Ohio State eases book-buying pain by putting selected books on line for their own students. The problem with this system is it lowers demand which will cause publishers to increase price to maintain margins.
socialbib - If you are a college student (, you should try to get your textbooks for free. It is a great site that is free to join if you are a currently enrolled student.
World Public Library

Other Free Textbooks Advocates
TeleRead-- Advocating A Well-Stocked National Digital Library
Free Curricula Center produces and distributes university-level curricula that can be copied freely and modified cooperatively.
Open Knowledge Foundation-- Protecting and Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age

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Statistics For Jewish Professional Leaders from Professor Saxe of Brandies University

Principles of Finance from Professor Tim Gallagher of Colorado State University