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Una Daly, the communication college outreach manager at Open Courseware Consortium says teachers want to collaborate, but they haven’t been supported on the college level.

The first prototype of the interactive open digital textbook that models what Steinberg is hoping to recreate in California is Collaborative Statistics, written by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, faculty members at De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif. The book is found on Rice University’s Connexions repository, which contains 1,100 open textbooks. Developed by the 20 Million Minds Foundation in collaboration with Kno, the PDF of the book is free, but students can choose to pay $20 for the interactive app on the iPad through Kno, which features live links and videos.

The bill establishes the online California Digital Open Source Library, which will house the 50 most commonly used books for required lower-division courses. Similar to Flat World Knowledge, students and teachers will be able to access and adapt the texts online for free, or pay $20 for either printed form or interactive app form for tablets or mobile devices (think Kno or Inkling).