California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

bcrowell writes "Although former Governor Schwarzenegger's free digital textbook initiative for K-12 education was a failure, state senator Darrell Steinberg has a new idea for the state-subsidized publication of college textbooks (details in the PDF links at the bottom). Newspaper editorials seem positive. It will be interesting to see if this works any better at the college level than it did for K-12, where textbook selection has traditionally been very bureaucratic. This is also different from Schwarzenegger's FDTI because Steinberg proposes spending state money to help create the books. The K-12 version suffered from legal uncertainty about the Williams case, which requires equal access to books for all students — many of whom might not have computers at home. At the symposium where the results of the FDTI's first round were announced, it became apparent that the only businesses interested in participating actively were not the publishers but computer manufacturers like Dell and Apple, who wanted to sell lots of hardware to schools."

Don't mess with the publishing industry, man

[elrous0]

I hear Houghton Mifflin has goons who break legs. When you make $150 profit on a simple 600-page textbook, you can afford the muscle.

State-Mandated textbooks work so well in TX

[ElmoGonzo]

Can you imagine the politics over what the textbooks should say about evolution, climate change, economics, history,etc. First edition says Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia but by the second edition, Eurasia has become Oceania's ally.

Re:I'm for open textbooks, but from another state.

[Hatta]

Of course they are, they're accurate. Reality has a well known liberal bias.

Re:Leaders, plural

[Tsingi]

I'm trying to figure out how we got to "gitmo" and "treasonous" from "Open Source Textbooks."

"Open Source Textbooks" -> loss of profit for publishers -> US government intervention -> black ops -> torture.

It's like a template you can apply to anything. Duh.