But the open-book movement will face competition from commercial e-book publishers, including CourseSmart, which this fall will begin offering digital versions of 4,300 widely adopted textbooks at half the price of print editions. Flat World Knowledge, a new company, plans to subsidize free digital titles starting next year, with sales of other materials and printed editions.
Diane Harley, principal researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, said professors weren't going to embrace digital course materials unless they were high quality and tailored to their often unique scholarship.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, August 21, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction
Pricey textbooks: An article in Monday's Section A about free online course materials challenging expensive college textbooks quoted Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, a commercial e-book company, as saying: "For all its popularity in the press and on blogs, [online textbooks are] all very marginal now." Lyman says he was referring to open-source textbooks, not to all online textbooks.
"Faculty are independent, they love their fields, and they hand-craft their courses," she said.
McAfee has high hopes for an enhanced version of his book that FlatWorld Knowledge plans to release this year.
"A whole bunch of people don't have access to knowledge. The knowledge in college textbooks, thousands of people hold that knowledge, those skills," he said. "And there's no reason for a small amount of money they couldn't produce books that are pretty good, and provided for free."
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gale.holland@latimes.com
