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"For both writers and adopters, if you're a teacher, the issue is time," Jacky Hood, co-director of the Open Doors Group and College Open Textbooks, told the Chronicle of Higher Education in January. "You're going to need a term off to either author or adopt a textbook, and that requires some kind of funding."

But David Wiley, a professor on leave from Brigham Young University who studied use of open textbooks at Utah's public schools, said there are already enough resources to teach lower-level courses. "If any university in the country today just wanted to ... say, 'We're never going to require students to pay for a textbook for a general education course again,' any school in the country could say that today," he said. In a study, Wiley found there was "basically no difference in the amount students learned" using open textbooks — and it saved the districts about 60 percent in book costs.

In 2012, McGraw-Hill’s profit margin was 25%; Wiley’s was 15%; and Pearson’s was 10%. Moreover, the profit margin of firms in the publishing sector increased on average by 2.5% between 2003 and 2012.

The publishers might complain that government funding for the creation of open textbooks constitutes interference in the free market. This argument overlooks the fact that the government is the buyer in the textbook market. In K-12, school districts — government entities — purchase the textbooks directly. In higher education, government subsidizes the purchase of textbooks through support for financial aid. Because the government already is the buyer, it is completely consistent with free market principles for the government to seek the best product at the lowest cost.

The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by Senators Durbin and Franken on November 14, 2013, would accelerate the development and adoption of open textbooks. The legislation would authorize the Secretary of Education to make grants to institutions of higher education “to support pilot programs that expand the use of open textbooks in order to achieve savings for students.”