The document discusses the high cost of traditional textbooks and how open educational resources (OER) provide an affordable alternative by allowing free copying, distribution, revision and remixing of content. It provides examples of how the cost to copy and distribute digital content is near zero, and how open licensing through OER enables unprecedented sharing and participation at scale online. Specific programs highlighted include the Open High School of Utah, Utah Open Textbooks initiative, and Textbook Zero that offer entire degrees using only freely available OER with little to no required textbook costs.
4. Textbooks – How Overpriced?
Provider Cost
Netflix – 20,000 Movies and TV $7.99 / month
Hulu Plus – 45,000 Movies and TV $7.99 / month
Spotify – 15 million Songs $9.99 / month
CourseSmart – 1 Biology Textbook $20.25 / month
The primary function of writing is to allow a person to leave an idea behind. Writing enabled the first asynchronous communication.
Books are a technology that made access to writing, and consequently ideas, more affordable by many orders of magnitude.
Affordability increased participation - more people leave ideas behind in the book era.
Today, we have access to several technologies that allow a person to leave an idea behind. In addition to writing, we can now use images, audio, and video.
Moving from the original analog / physical formats of writing, images, audio, and video to digital formats makes access to ideas more affordable by many orders of magnitude again. Digital is to analog what print was to handwriting.
Affordability increases participation again - many more people leave ideas behind in the internet era.