An Experiment in Open-Access Textbook Publishing: Changing the World One Textbook at a Time

Abstract

The revolt against the ever-increasing costs of postsecondary texts has begun. No one can deny that reselling texts, sharing texts, e-book reserves, and free copies that are resold have forced the commercial publishers to take action. But at what cost to higher education? Just as the cable monopolies are beginning to lose ground to other delivery systems of broadcast content, so too are textbook companies losing ground to other forms of delivery. Most commercially developed e-textbooks are little more than enhanced print editions and have limited access and restrictions on printing and downloading the content. Open-access texts solve many of these problems, but, as many now realize, ‘open’ does not equal ‘no cost.’ This article will explore some of the forces that are driving the open-access phenomenon, and describes the joint effort by the University Press of Florida and the University of Florida Department of Mathematics project for open-access calculus texts.