The Eleven Learning Blog

The recent article in The New York Times about the efforts underway at companies and organizations like Curriki, Flat World Knowledge, and the CK-12 Foundation to provide free, open-source textbooks certainly struck a chord.  The thing that grabbed me was this quote from Scott McNealy:

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks…It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”

The notion that ‘everything will be free’ is something we hear from people in the tech world. And I appreciate the passion and sincerity of the open-source, free online textbook movement. (That makes sense, because that’s part of what we’re about.)

But I don’t believe that’s going to be the only surviving model. Open source software didn’t totally replace proprietary software. (And as McNealy well knows from his former life running Sun Microsystems, there’s plenty of money to be made off of open source.)

It’s a lot of work to make a good textbook. Some people want to give their work away, but many more want to get paid. And as Flat World Knowledge has shown, a lot of people want to pay them, even when offered a free option. Generating revenue attracts new ideas, innovations, and business models, and that will benefit authors (and educators and students) in both free and paid camps.

Of course, reducing costs is only half of the Textbook Problem. Making better, more relevant, more applicable books is a more challenging issue. And a topic for another day.