Photo via Flickr user greenasian

This past week, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that will see the State of California fund the creation of more than fifty open-source textbooks for use by the state’s university students. The purpose of the bill is to help offset the rising cost of university tuition: “Many students are paying more than $1,000 every year on their textbooks, sometimes having to choose between buying the books they need or paying for food and other living expenses,” said Senator Darrell Steinberg, the author of the bill, in a statement issued after the bill passed.

The new textbooks will hopefully be available for the start of the 2013-2014 academic year, and will be produced by a partnership between the California Open Education Resources Council and the state’s universities. Additionally, the State of California will create an online library where students will be able access the textbooks free of charge – alternatively, students will be able to purchase $20 hardcopies. 

Overpriced course textbooks are nothing new. Several weeks ago, the Toronto Standard wrote about the $180 picture-less art-history textbook OCAD students were being asked to purchase by their university. Thankfully, this bill has the chance to make life easier for Canadian students as well. The new law mandates that any textbook written under the Council’s mandate be published using a Creative Commons License, so as long as the material in the textbooks is relevant to the course they’re teaching, even Canadian professors can freely assign the textbooks to their classes. [The Atlantic]

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Igor Bonifacic is a simple intern working for the Toronto Standard. You can follow him on twitter at @igorbonifacic.