Textbook Initiative in California
This from Atlantic Online, the University of California System is working to make free digital textbooks available nationally. The project strikes both at the problem of e-books and the problem of textbook costs. Textbooks are an expensive part of the expensive proposition that is known as university study. This could be an open source initiative that speaks to issues of expense, and textbooks would seem to be perfect candidates for e-book publication: they are frequently updated, they are frequently part of courses where other elements of the course are online (things like syllabi), and they are not books that people necessarily want to keep. There is also something about this that strikes forward as public initiative within higher education. Within the critiques of the commodification of college wrought by networked information technology, here’s one working the other way–open source to promote face-to-face. Worth noting and reading…