As tuition costs and textbook prices continue to climb, students and faculty are looking for ways to bring these costs down. As a result, an increasing number of professors are choosing to use “open textbooks” when teaching their classes.

Open textbooks are free online textbooks that are available for download. In addition, users may choose to customize and to print any part of the online text. In this way, professors can make changes to the content in order to better suit their personal teaching styles. Depending upon the preferences of the original author of the material, it may even be possible to request professionally bound printed copies of the content for just $10 to $20.

With the rising costs of textbooks outpacing inflation by a rate of 2 to 1 over the past two decades, students can certainly use any help they can get with bringing the costs down. In fact, textbooks currently account for 26% of the cost of tuition and fees that students pay at a four-year public universities and almost three-quarters of the cost of attending a community college. With open textbooks, however, these costs can be brought down significantly.

“The way we’re going to lower prices in the long run is by giving viable options,” said Nicole Allen, who is the director of the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign by Student Public Interest Research Groups, in a USA Today article. “Right now the publishers have a stronghold on the market. What we’re trying to do is expand the market and instigate a market shift.”

The Student Public Interest Research Groups, which is a non-profit student advocacy network, has been pushing for the use of open textbooks since 2003. To that end, Allen is leading an effort to obtain signatures for an Open Textbook Statement of Intent, which asks faculty to consider using open textbooks in their classes. So far, the statement has more than 1,200 signatures from faculty across the country.

Some colleges are already taking notice of the potential positive effects of using open textbooks. In fact, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California is starting a new project that will train its professors on how to find and use open resources. The ultimate goal of the project will be to get their faculty members to create their own open textbooks. The trend has also been noticed within the publishing industry.

“The current business model fails the students, the faculties and the authors,” said Eric Frank, who worked for Pearson Education for seven years before quitting to pursue his own business within the industry. “Students are used to having choices in what to buy; instead they’re getting the same thing they got 50 years ago and paying a lot for it. Instructors have different teaching styles, but a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter book never allows them to deliver it. The authors are getting paid less and less for their book. We flip the model completely.”

After spending three months talking to authors, students and teachers about textbooks, Frank determined that open textbooks were the idea solution. As such, he and his business partner, Jeff Shelstad, plan to launch Flat World Knowledge in January. Flat World Knowledge, which will be the first commercial open textbook publisher, will provide free online textbooks that can be printed and bound in black and white for about $25 or in color for $35-39. With the average price of a new textbook being about $150, that is quite the savings.

In addition to helping students save money, instructors who use open textbooks in their classrooms will be able to modify the content while still allowing the authors of the books to be compensated. Currently, Frank is recruiting authors, who will be compensated through royalties as well as through the supplemental materials they produce, for the project.

“This has been happening for 10 years with research articles, and I think textbook publishing is next,” says Rob Beezer, who is a professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. “Now there’s room for people like myself to put something together, and I think you’re going to see more of that.”

Beezer wrote his own textbook entitled A First Course in Linear Algebra in 2004. Based on his own lecture notes, the book is available for free download and print. Or, students may purchase a soft-cover copy of the book for $24.50, of which Beezer receives $5. He uses the $5 to update the content and to pay students who find mistakes in the book.

“The open textbooks that are out there serve as proof that it is possible to have a high-quality open textbook that is being used in classrooms,” said Allen. “They might just be the thing that will change the textbook industry for the better.”