But What Will Happen to the Campus Bookstore?

If you've taken a night class recently or have kids in college, you've probably felt the sticker shock induced by college textbook costs. Sometimes the course materials alone can cost as much as a single credit hour. But, resourceful as ever, college students are finding ways around these costs and some professors are helping them. A recent article in the New York Times discusses how publishing textbooks online for free is becoming increasingly popular.

Ask any composition instructor about a college freshman's understanding of plagiarism and you'll find students have always been a bit cavalier when it comes to ideas about copyright and intellectual property laws. Realizing that the cost of photocopying a textbook was less than the textbook itself, more than a few undergrads simply borrowed the book from another student and proceeded to the nearest copier. When scanners became cheap and widely available, volunteers scanned textbooks and now you can find many of them online, accessible through bit-torrents or similar file-sharing networks.

Perhaps accepting the inevitable, some professors have dismissed six-figure advances and published their books online without cost. Why? Probably because the old way is broken or outdated. As the article says, the publishing process takes too long, traditional textbooks don't have the flexibility or interconnectivity that the Internet provides, and publishing online exposes the academic community to new ideas instantaneously.

At Rice University - with the help of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is also a funder of Public Agenda - a service called Connexions is publishing textbooks for free. Free textbooks are great, but perhaps more important is the effort to have open source textbooks. An author can put forth an idea or explanation one morning and find his work critiqued by a crowd of interested and often professional peers that afternoon. If one explanation of Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics isn't completely clear, another, clearer version will soon pop up to replace it. It reminds one of evolution, in which the best ideas survive (or perhaps less favorably, the most popular ideas survive). It's quite literally a Wikipedia of textbooks.

One of the things that we discovered as we did research for Public Agenda's report, "Squeeze Play: How Parents and the Public Look at Higher Education Today," is that some believe the college system is old-fashioned and many of its long-accepted ways of doing things are the reason why it is impossible to provide a high-quality education to many students at an affordable price.

College hasn't changed radically in hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years, students have been paying fees for course materials. Perhaps the sloughing off of this tradition is the beginning of a larger metamorphosis, one that will signal a cheaper, more plastic, more robust means of higher education. Those of us who have passed through the hallowed halls of academia may not recognize college in the future, but it may be the best way to teach a new generation of students in an ever-evolving world.