Los Angeles Times featured a story about a professor who wrote an open-source economics textbook.
Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away — online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.
… McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost — and, they say, the dumbing down — of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.
… McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005. With costs continuing to climb, it would be “reasonable to conclude that [individual student] expenditures can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today….
… McAfee has high hopes for an enhanced version of his book that FlatWorld Knowledge plans to release this year. ‘A whole bunch of people don’t have access to knowledge. The knowledge in college textbooks, thousands of people hold that knowledge, those skills,’ he said. ‘And there’s no reason for a small amount of money they couldn’t produce books that are pretty good, and provided for free.’
