Textbooks, the coming future?

Here it comes:

The Rice University-based open-education platform Connexions today unveiled a bold plan to shake up the $4 billion college textbook industry by providing free online publisher-quality textbooks for five of the country’s most-attended college courses.

The OpenStax College textbook initiative, which is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation, will publish its first two books — College Physics and Introduction to Sociology — in March. Two biology textbooks — one for majors and one for non-majors — and a textbook for introductory anatomy and physiology will be published this fall.

“If we capture just 10 percent of the market with these first five textbooks, an estimated 1 million college students in the United States could save $90 million over the next five years,” said Rice’s Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of Connexions.