None of these topics is just like posting readings in Blackboard, but none of these things is really the same as any other of these topics either, so let's see if we can clear some things up.
There is a massive wave of interest in open-access textbooks in this country, driven by student and parent concern about higher education costs, which is driving the interest of both state and federal governments. If you heard an interview at an Occupy movement site this last fall, you heard a college student complaining about how much college debt he or she was in - and probably how disappointing it was that all that debt didn't lead to a job. Governments simply cannot ignore any more the public's complaints about costs in higher education, and textbook costs are often very large and hit students very hard because most families don't know to plan for them.
An open-access textbook is a textbook that is published under a public domain license or, more often, a version of the GNU or Creative Commons license. This means that users - you and I - are able to download, modify, and share the book as we would like - and for free. Teachers can use just chapters 3 through 8, if they want, and write their own chapter 1, and post it on their open class website as well as in a locked Blackboard or Moodle course. This is a huge difference from any other type of textbook, not because it's electronic, but because it's modifiable and shareable.
Florida and California have large movements to create textbooks along these lines, especially for introductory classes for which one textbook can serve many thousands of students. The federal government is also sponsoring a project to foster more good quality open-access textbooks. If you Google "open access resource examples", or "open educational resources", you'll see a number of examples of these projects - "resources" rather than "textbooks" because creating distributable, modifiable videos, simulations, and exercises is just as important to this movement as textbooks. (Check out OERCommons to find resources in your field.)
Most open-access resources are distributed electronically. Electronic distribution makes distribution very low cost and easy. That often confuses both faculty and students, though, because there are a ton of electronic textbooks that are for-profit, restricted-copyright texts just like the textbooks they pay for in the bookstore. A recent study demonstrated that electronic textbooks don't save students any money, and the reason for that is simple: because they are provided by the usual publishers and usually priced in the same way as the usual print textbooks. Those publishers have their own reasons for those pricing models but they aren't changing them just because the e-textbooks are distributed electronically.
There's no denying, though, that electronic textbooks are a fast growing category, because electronic books in general are a fast growing category. It's been many months since Amazon reported that their sales of e-books surpassed their sales of print books - and in Internet-time, six months is like four dog-years. One of the most popular gifts for the Christmas and Hannukah just passed was an e-book reader. Kindles, Nooks, and various tablets and other e-readers all did very well (though yes, Kindles outsold the rest). We've tested the new Kindles in Faculty Computing Services and the Kindle Fire is a nice alternative to an iPad for those who want a smaller device and don't mind that it runs an Android operating system rather than Apple's iOS (translation: it isn't quite as cool and fun to use). E-books can also be read on smartphones, which now have large, good screens. 2011 seems to have been the tipping point many were waiting for for a long time: e-books are now perfectly normal. Lots of students still don't want them - but lots of students do.
In such an environment, it's only reasonable that students sometimes want e-book alternatives to their textbooks. But there are two very different options for our selection: e-books from publishers, whose only difference from the standard books is that they are electronic, and e-books that are open-access, that are freely distributable and modifiable.
For the student, the cost differential is considerable. For the instructor, the options are very different as well: the OER textbook offers an opportunity to modify existing textbooks or related resources and copy or distribute them however they please.
(Some of the open-access educational textbooks are provided with a print-on-demand option, confusing things further. For a small charge, the provider will print an inexpensive copy and send it to the student. The cost is often 1/10th of the cost of a commercial textbook. The student in these cases has the choice of paying for the print version, or just downloading the electronic version for free. Again, the primary difference is the license structure of the textbook. OER textbooks are distributable and modifiable. Regular commercial textbooks must be purchased from the publisher and cannot be copied or changed, and all standard copyright restrictions apply to making copies for your class.)
There's another reason faculty should be aware of the open-access textbook movement. Those faculty who create such texts have a chance to be very influential in their fields. Without the constraints of publishers or paper distribution, one textbook could easily be adopted for an entire state, or the nation. Moreover, because it is electronically distributed, updates and corrections can be redistributed without any real additional cost.
Many of our faculty do create textbooks, and this is an opportunity for them to affect their field in a very big way. For those programs with defined goals and agreed-upon approaches to their goals, even a group of faculty could quickly collaborate to create influential textbooks in their field. I think we will be seeing more and more of these developments in the next one to two years - very quickly for the academic environment, but kind of slowly for the consumer electronics world. Open-access textbooks, more than e-textbooks in general, are where the two worlds really come together.
Does that clarify? Confuse? Please do comment and let me know!
