# The Affordable College Textbook Act: What You Need to Know

College textbooks are expensive—really expensive. The average student spends about $1,290 per year on books and course materials, and textbook prices have skyrocketed over the past couple of decades. This bill tries to tackle that problem by promoting "open textbooks"—educational materials that are free to use and can be shared openly, kind of like how Wikipedia works but for college courses.

Here's what the bill actually does: It creates a federal grant program that gives money to colleges and universities to develop and use open textbooks instead of expensive commercial ones. Schools can use these grants to create new free textbooks, adapt existing ones, train professors how to use them, and research whether they actually work as well as traditional textbooks. The catch is that anything created with this federal money has to be released to the public for free, so other schools can use it too. The bill also requires that these materials be accessible to students with disabilities and available in formats that anyone can download and modify (as long as they give credit to the original authors).

Beyond just creating free textbooks, the bill beefs up transparency requirements. Colleges now have to clearly tell students whether their course materials are open educational resources and provide information about what data publishers collect from students using digital textbooks. Publishers also have to disclose whether students can opt out of data collection. Additionally, college bookstores get better access to course material information so they can help find cheaper alternatives and present options to professors.

The bill essentially bets that if the government invests in creating free, high-quality textbooks and helps colleges switch to them, students will save significant money while still getting quality education. It's designed to be a long-term solution rather than a quick fix—schools that get grants have to plan for how they'll keep updating these materials after the funding ends, and the government will track whether the program actually reduces costs and improves learning.

Affordable College Textbook Act

Neguse, Joe

Affordable College Textbook ActThis bill provides statutory authority for an open textbook grant program for&nbsp;institutions of higher education (IHEs). (A similar program, known as the Open Textbooks Pilot program, first received federal funding in FY2018.)Specifically, the bill directs the Department of Education to make grants to IHEs or states on behalf of IHEs&nbsp;to support projects that expand the use of open textbooks. An open textbook is an educational resource that either resides in the public domain or has been released under an intellectual license that permits its free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others.Within three years of the bill's enactment, the Government Accountability Office must report to Congress on the cost of textbooks at IHEs. This report must examine, among other topics, the factors that have contributed&nbsp;to the change in the cost of textbooks.