The article appears to be lifted from a student newspaper article from May 2013 http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/campus/article_3d41096...

A book by the same name by Charles Stangor, University of Maryland and used for PSCY 100 classes there, so more than likely the book discussed in the article, is also available free at https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=48 but paid and you can also get v2.0! at https://students.flatworldknowledge.com/course/1315333

One thing that is missing here is a discussion of how a lot of good professors have a strong incentive not to use open source books: Many of them wrote the ones they are using for their course. If a professor wrote a good course text then they have a strong financial incentive to make the current edition mandatory for the class. Dealing with this will require some tense negotiations and possibly mean that the school will have to either buy out the books, or adjust contracts to include the copyright to faculty authored content.

To me, the most interesting part is how clearly the textbook industry and the reporter don't "get" the open source development process. For instance:

    But [David Anderson, executive director of higher
    education at the Association of American Publishers] said
    traditional textbooks can cost up to a few million dollars
    to produce, and he is skeptical that such an effort can be
    re-created on a large scale for a product distributed for
    free.

And the related issue is the use of "open source" to describe a process that does not seem to allow contributions from the public, which is of course how those software projects became so big in the first place:

    Roberts estimated that he spent 80 hours pulling
    together open-source materials for his textbook, working
    late into the night to write some sections himself when he
    could not find good material.

In summary: using open source textbook materials is a great idea, but it would be better if they learned from how the software industry does it.

>Educators at all levels are still figuring out how to best use technology in the classroom. For example, Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance announced recently that the district would aim to place a tablet or laptop in the hand of every student within five years.

I'm not entirely sold on the idea that every student having a tablet or laptop is the most effective use of education money. I tend to lean more towards having classroom sets of laptops or tablets and a active learning/ combined media class room setup.

Going to pitch Connexions.org / CNX.org - open source textbooks by open source editor - great folks, great mission, all on GitHub

The title doesn't match the article, and is incredibly bad. I thought by reading it that USM decided to incarcerate a student pilot for using a free open-source textbook.

I had an off campus college bookstore for over ten years.

The paragraph...

The textbook publishing industry is "not opposed" to open-source textbooks and is even partnering with some providers, said David Anderson, executive director of higher education at the Association of American Publishers. But he said traditional textbooks can cost up to a few million dollars to produce, and he is skeptical that such an effort can be re-created on a large scale for a product distributed for free.

made me laugh because it sounds like the argument Encyclopedia Britannica used against Wikipedia.

I am sure there will be attempts to legislate this "problem" to the publishing industries liking.