California Governor Jerry Brown has recently signed
two new bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that pave the way for free, open license
digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses
offered in California. The legislation, introduced by Senate President pro Tem
Darrell Steinberg, passed the state Senate and Assembly in August.
Textbooks developed under the new will
be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license. This will allow anyone to use or distribute
the content free of charge, so long as the authors are appropriately credited.
It will also allow teachers to modify the textbooks to best serve their
students.
What remains to be determined is who
will write these textbooks and whether their quality will be any good. If they
turn out to be garbage, or significantly worse than alternatives, students may
still find they have to purchase hundreds of dollars’ worth of books each
semester. Furthermore, if free digital textbooks are only made available for
the 50 most popular lower-division courses, this would leave open the continued
gouging of upper division and graduate students and anyone taking any of the
thousands of less popular lower-division courses.
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