Viewpoint: The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks

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Viewpoint: The Economic Case for Creative Commons Textbooks

10/4/2005

Fred M. Beshears
Senior Strategist
University of California at Berkeley
fmb@berkeley.edu

Talk to virtually any student about the cost of textbooks and you will likely hear loud complaints about the expense associated with course texts. According to a recent General Accounting Office report:

"... the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student for academic year 2003-2004 was $898 at 4-year public institutions, or about 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At 2-year public institutions, where low-income students are more likely to pursue a degree program and tuition and fees are lower, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student was $886 in academic year 2003-2004, representing almost three-quarters of the cost of tuition and fees."

While there are explanations that attempt to justify textbook prices in the report, there are few suggestions to contain or reduce the cost to students.

Recently, however, proposals have been advanced that might significantly reduce the cost of textbooks benefiting students as well as faculty, colleges and universities. One significant proposal put forward by Ira Fuchs, Vice President for Research at the Mellon Foundation, called for the creation of Educore - an organization dedicated to the development of open source educational software. The Educore proposal envisions a consortium of 1,000 colleges and universities around the world where each member institution would be asked to contribute between $5,000 and $25,000 per year, based on size.

Inspired by Fuchs's vision, it is possible to conceive of a similar approach to acquire and distribute high-quality creative commons content that could be used in any of the following combinations: (a) as the basis of an online course, (b) as an electronic textbook, or (c) as a customized printed textbook for use in a traditional college course. We call this approach OpenTextbook.

OpenTextbook's business model would be simple: traditional colleges and universities would agree to pay membership dues to purchase content from one or more open universities, such as the British Open University (UKOU). OpenTextbook would not develop the content; it would purchase content in bulk. In this sense, OpenTextbook would be similar to consumer cooperatives and buying clubs that pool member resources to gain purchasing power in the market.

To get an idea of how much high quality content costs, the UKOU spends on average $3 million dollars (U.S.) per course on content development, and they have more than 200 undergraduate courses in their inventory, which comes to a total investment of $600 million. They also keep their content updated on a regular basis, which, among other things, means replacing each course from scratch after eight years. In other words, the UKOU currently spends around $75 million per year on content development for these courses.

If the OpenTextbook coalition distributed this cost evenly to each of its members, the annual membership would come to $75,000 a year per campus. For a school with an enrollment of 25,000 first-time, full-year students, this comes out to three dollars per student per year: a bargain compared to the current $898 per year cost of textbooks.