Dan - Good work getting Digital History on the web for free. I am currently revising our list of books. I am splitting them into 2 categories - free online textbooks and open textbooks (free in more ways than price).

Dorothea - The strategy of the project is essentially that - to generate awareness of open texts among faculty. Instructors will always choose the best book, so the trick is to get affordable books on the table.

Thanks for the post!

@Jonathan: It is indeed true that textbook writing is one of the only well-paid publishing opportunities for humanities scholars. Thus my thought that the amount of money a publisher provides could be replaced by a grant.

@Dorothea: Good point about rights. It would be good to know what percent of a textbook’s cost is due to this, though I think it’s very minor. And surely there are public domain images that could be used for a history textbook, at least. Math textbooks, with many equations, are at least as expensive as foreign language textbooks to produce. Yet there are a number of open ones. Agreed about the distrust of digital among the humanities; I’m writing another post about that right now.

* Rights clearance on humanities textbooks (literature or art especially) can be murder.

* Whether authors make money on textbooks or not, textbook publishers make a mint. There’s a whole marketing structure there for getting textbooks into courses. THAT is something an Open Textbooks initiative might address.

* A lot of humanities textbooks (e.g. foreign language) have very high production values. Text artisanry is expensive!

* The humanities still tend to distrust the digital. The free and digital is even more poorly-perceived.