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"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."

"Today Polish Council of Ministers adopted regulation concerning the implementation of „Digital School" program for computerization of Polish schools and raising ICT competences. Pilot of the project aimed for 380 schools in Poland will equip them with hardware (tablets, computers for students, additional equipment). Also digital and free (under Creative Commons Attribution or compatible) textbooks for grades 4-6 in primary schools (K4-K6) will be created (43 millions PLN is assigned for textbooks). This is the first major government project in Poland which creates Open Educational Resources especially textbooks."

"For many, "open textbooks" seem to be primarily about cost savings, about saving money for both funders and learners, but not particularly about challenging the "form" of what we have known as a textbook. And I agree, affordability is a strong motivator to get into this space, and an obvious selling point for all the stakeholders (well, almost all - commercial publishers don't seem exactly thrilled about it.)"

"MIT OpenCourseWare and textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge have teamed up to provide free, high-quality textbooks to learners accessing OCW's innovative OCW Scholar courses. This is among the first collaborations between an OpenCourseWare publisher and an open textbook publisher and highlights the growing opportunity for open education efforts to reinforce one another in creating rich learning experiences."

The Utah State of Office of Education (USOE) today announced it will develop and support open textbooks in the key curriculum areas of secondary language arts, science, and mathematics. USOE will encourage districts and schools throughout the state to consider adopting these textbooks for use beginning this fall.

"From our perspective, we view textbook publishers as highly exploitative," Justin Goss, a student senator at UC Davis, told members of the Senate Education Committee. "While I am sure that they are perfectly nice people, it continues to baffle me why a reordered table of contents and a shiny new binding warrants and additional $50, $60, or sometimes $100 on the price tag."

During his nearly four years at UC Berkeley, Lucas Zucker has gone to great lengths to find affordable textbooks. He shopped online for the best deals and often waited weeks into the semester for the books to arrive from across the country; he shared books with classmates; he bought older editions with identical content that was rearranged; and one semester he didn't buy some books because they were just too expensive.

Open Textbooks blog post

"students also share their textbooks because they are so incredibly expensive. And as the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on e-books makes lending someone your copy difficult if not impossible, students are likely steering away from e-books because they simply don't work for them - practically or economically."

"By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book."

"In Year 1 we: Created an API (OERPub) for publishing OER to remixable repositories. The API is an adaptation of the popular SWORD API. Implemented the API in Connexions, a repository anyone can use to create open textbooks and share learning materials. Developed an importer for creating and publishing remixable OER to Connexions. Formed a team of designers and developers using OERPub."

"While existing laws, business models, and outdated educational practices make it difficult for teachers and learners to leverage the full power of the Internet to access high-quality, affordable learning materials, OER can be freely copied and shared (and revised and remixed) without breaking the law."