What is an Open Textbook?

The following is a revised version of What is an Open Textbook? by Christina Hendricks:

An open textbook is like a commercial textbook, except (1) it is publicly available online free of charge (or at a low cost in print), and (2) it has an open licence that allows others to reuse it, download and revise it, and redistribute it. For example, this guide has a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which allows reuse, revision, and redistribution so long as the original creator is attributed.

In addition to saving students money, an open textbook can be revised to be more relevant to one’s teaching and learning objectives. In an open textbook, one may add examples more relevant to one’s own context or the topic of a course, or embedded slides, videos, or other resources. Undergraduate students in an introductory-level physics course reported that the thing they most appreciated about the open textbook used in that course was that it was customized to fit the course, followed very closely by the fact that it was free of cost (Hendricks, Reinsberg, and Rieger 2017).

Several commercial publishers offer relatively inexpensive digital textbooks (whether on their own or available through an access code that students must pay to purchase), which may have certain limitations and other issues:

• Access for students is often limited to a short period of time;
• Students cannot buy used copies from others, nor sell their own copies to others, to save money;
• Depending on the platform you use, there may be limits to how students can interact with and take notes on the books (and they may not be able to export their notes outside the book, so they lose access to those as well when they lose access to the book).

None of these is the case with open textbooks. Students can download any book and keep it for as long as they wish. They can interact with it in multiple formats: on the web; as editable word processing formats; offline as PDF, EPUB; as a physical print book, and more.