Should text books be open and free?

by Anita Bandrowski

We at NIF have recently discovered that Gov Brown (California) just signed into law a program that will create 50 lower division text books and a new library that will house them.

Many people are not currently terribly excited about digital text books for several key reasons: most text books can only be paged through (no index), this paging takes quite a long time, they are often available to users for a defined period of time, there is often no possibility to make notes/highlights on the text and of course they are still relatively expensive. These are all very good reasons to be against using digital texts and possibly the major reasons that they have largely not fulfilled the promise of e-texts.

Most people will see the open and free aspect of these 50 books and may be exited about solving the cost/time of use issues, but the text mining/informatics community will find something else quite exciting. The text book data will be available via xml and will be covered under the creative commons license. This means that much of the promise of electronic text books such as linking to additional material like definitions in line, opening demos or videos from prominent members of the scientific community can be done by anyone not just the publisher. Conventional e-texts that are covered by restrictive licenses disallow automated text mining to find things in the text and link by any group other than the publisher, but with these open texts the promise of e-books is renewed. Will many groups access the text, recognize 'entities' and discourse to learn and link to both materials and fulfill the promise of a real 'living text book'? Hope so.