About the Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives

Two dramatically opposed announcements put the textbook publishing industry on notice recently that it could be facing rapid disruption. Apple announced its iBooks Author app and invited authors to create textbooks tied both by a proprietary format and by license to its iBooks store. Meanwhile, the state of California (for the second time) announced that it would move toward free textbooks for schools. Similar efforts are underway in other countries.

One of the organizations in the area of open textbooks Open Doors, described as "the umbrella organization for College Open Textbooks, Open Courseware for Open Textbooks, and other exciting programs." Open Doors collects and curates more than 700 textbooks devised by various organizations for use throughout the US and Canada. After a discussion with a representative of that organization, Jacky Hood, and other commentators, I wrote an article for the College Open Textbooks blog. I recommend you read that posting, which I kept short to respect their guidelines, and then return here for some extra ideas that I lacked space for in the posting...