The Fight for Affordable Textbooks Takes On a New Angle:
In the past three years, the price of a college textbook has risen 21 percent. This can be attributed to the publishing companies who opt to make new editions yearly with virtually no changes, just some shuffling of a few chapters, as well as bundling, selling books with CDs and other useless material that students are then forced to pay for. With textbooks for the average student being in the upper ranges of $500-600 per semester, students are really starting to feel the crunch, especially in our ailing economy. The solution? Make textbooks more affordable. To do so, the Open Textbooks Project for The Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group (WISPIRG) has implemented a new plan. This plan is called the Open Source Textbooks Project.
Open source textbooks are free textbooks that students can view online. They effectively cut out the middle man by essentially eliminating the abusive practices of the publishing companies. Open Textbooks Project Coordinator Jared Forney comments, ""The greater flexibility in copyright proffered by open textbooks will slowly correct for the current market deficiencies that exist presently, and will ultimately force large publishing companies to either adapt to the changing market, or face loss of profits.""
With the publishing companies out of the picture, students can no longer be charged for things such as new editions and bundling. In fact, students can instead print free copies of specified pages or simply purchase the book for $20-30 instead of the usual $90-100, all online. This movement of Open Source is picking up momentum with universities such as Harvard and UC-Davis already utilizing this great system. In fact, 2000 professors from across the country have already said they would switch to open source textbooks as soon as possible.
Madison isn't too far off the map either, with one professor in the Wisconsin School of Business already using an open source textbook. Our goals for this semester are to inform as many professors and students as possible about open source and get 10 professors to commit to and publicly announce the switch from the regular textbook to an open source textbook. To achieve this goal, we must first get the word out.
Open source textbooks are the future. To learn more information, come to our Open Forum which will be taking place next week. Details to come.
—Valerie Mukete
UW-Madison sophomore
WISPIRG Media Intern
