This week, California took a big step forward in open-source education. Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a proposal to create a website that will allow students to download popular textbooks for free. The legislation contains two bills: One, a proposal for the state to fund 50 open-source digital textbooks, targeted to lower-division courses, which will be produced by California's universities. The other bill is a proposal to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host those books.
Are textbooks history in the digital era? : States across the country are slashing education budgets, forcing schools to cut expenses. One option getting a lot of attention is digital textbooks. Stacey Vanek-Smith reports.
October 14 is Open Access day. Co-sponsored by the Public Library of Science, open access is gaining ground, but PLOS, SPARC, and Students for FreeCulture are hoping to get a little boost with this first OA Day.
The Authors Guild filed suit against five universities and the digital tower, called HathiTrust, that those universities created to preserve and make available to students and faculty scans of books from their collections.
A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental.