The main idea here, politically and socially, is to lighten the burden -- a little bit -- for students who have been hit with tuition increases at California's public schools in recent years. "Many students are paying more than $1,000 every year on their textbooks, sometimes having to choose between buying the books they need or paying for food and other living expenses," said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, the author of the bills, in a statement.

The new law will also be something of a technological experiment -- and an intriguing one, at that. For one thing, it makes a point of extending its impact beyond California's borders. Any digital textbooks created under the council's auspices, the new legislation says, must be placed under a Creative Commons license -- which will allow faculty at universities in other states to make use of the textbooks for their own students. And the textbooks, furthermore, must be encoded in XML (or another "appropriate successor format") to facilitate their re-use.

So can government successfully step in to encourage the development of textbooks that are both open-source and high-quality? Can Sacramento be its own kind of digital disruptor? As Ars Technica's Timothy Lee noted, "It seems unlikely that having the government issue an RFP would be a good way to develop, say, an open-source operating system." Which is very true.

Then again, much of our assumptions about education -- that it should take place in classrooms, that it should rely on expensive textbooks -- is a matter of institutional intertia as much as anything else. Sometimes, wide-scale change needs to come from the top down rather than vice versa. And California, for all its financial problems, is full of universities whose faculty and staff have expertise in pedagogy and digital technology. So there's a good chance that this 50-book initiative is the start of a broader overhaul -- one that, among other things, will find bulky, expensive textbooks replaced by versions that are both digital and free.

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