Open Source Textbooks

I basically agree with Matt Yglesias who posted about this a while back. Textbooks are needlessly expensive, and with modern technology it should be easy for teachers to collaborate and come up with good, free alternatives. This will have a secondary effect on the teaching market, since a lot of professors supplement their income with textbook sales, but that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. A lot of the material in law school textbooks is free, since the government doesn't copyright judicial opinions (or other government publications).

A big question is when professors (but also teachers in primary and secondary education) will switch to free readings. Many already have, but many haven't. I suspect that there will be a fairly rapid shift at some point, as norms shift (currently a lot of professors probably don't want to offend the tenured professors who write textbooks). Anyway, certainly textbooks are a significant enough expense that open sourcing them should do a lot of good.