As California moves forward with the first open-source digital textbook program in the nation this fall, the best content seems a lot less like Wikipedia and a lot more like traditional publishing.
Bulky, hefty and downright expensive, conventional school textbooks may rank as the most outdated part of our nation's public education system. Many observers, including Chris Anderson, author of Free, have speculated that crowd sourcing could help bring down the cost of textbooks and improve their quality--but chipping away at the publishing industry's last profit center has proven more challenging in practice. In 2002, the California Open-Source Textbook Project aimed to produce a history textbook via Wikibooks that it estimated could save California $200 million per year. To date, the project has never cobbled together a complete book.
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