It’s time for college textbooks to catch up with the 21st century. Online, open-access textbooks that rely heavily on information in the public domain would not only cost students a fraction as much, but they also could be readily updated and easily customized to individual professors’ courses. That’s a big deal considering that many of the most commonly used traditional textbooks cost more than $150. Buying used books isn’t the option it used to be because professors often demand the latest version even when the changes are minimal.

State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) is on the right track with his proposal for California to lead the way in creating an open-access digital library that would provide free online textbooks for the 50 introductory courses with the highest enrollment. Students could order a print version at cost, about $20. The state would put out requests for proposals for each of these; publishers, professors and others would be welcome to bid. Academics would oversee quality. Though initially expensive to subsidize, the books would be easy to update and the savings for students would add up to billions of dollars over time.

But when it comes to intellectual property, sticky details matter, and Steinberg has yet to figure those out. It’s still uncertain, for example, whether the resulting texts would be available only at California’s public universities or whether students at, say, Stanford and Caltech could partake. We think the latter; if the state is underwriting an open-access library, it’s producing a public product to which all people in the state should have access. That’s not taking into account whether the books should be made available nationwide, or even worldwide. We think they should; why waste intellectual effort? The state could charge nonresidents to recoup some of its costs.

Speaking of costs, Steinberg proposes a $25-million allocation for this project — half a million dollars to write and make available each of the 50 textbooks, a cost to taxpayers that should be questioned, especially given the recent cuts to education. True, the books would save California students far more than that, but the money simply isn’t in the budget. Steinberg should court the big foundations that have been champions of education, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to help with the project. And it might make sense to impose some fee for access, say $20 per student, and more for a print version. Students would still save a lot of money, but the state wouldn’t have to cover the entire bill.


Steinberg also should look into any long-term costs that might reduce the project’s impact. If academic publishers see profits shrink on their biggest-selling textbooks, they might respond by raising prices on other texts to make up the difference.

The forward-looking concept is promising, but a better course of action would be to approach this brave new publishing world more cautiously, confining it at first to a couple of pilot textbooks so the state can learn as it goes.