Dynamic Books, a publishing platform and line of customizable digital textbooks from Macmillan, announced an agreement with College Open Textbooks to identify quality public domain or open licensed textbooks that can be integrated into the Dynamic Books platform. College Open Textbooks has identified 27 open textbooks on a variety of academic subjects that will be made available through Dynamic Books beginning in January 2011 for a fee of $20 per student per term.
College Open Textbooks is a nonprofit coalition of 15 institutions formed to help reduce the cost of textbooks by finding and promoting the use of public domain, peer reviewed textbooks. COT identifies and promotes the use of these texts (either found in the public domain or licensed under a open Creative Commons copyright) to more than 2000 community colleges around the country.
Jacky Hood, director of College Open Textbooks, said the organization also provides more than 1000 people around the country to train colleges how to use open textbooks. Hood said that COT texts are used in trade schools, community colleges and military service academics.
Launched earlier this year, Dynamic Books is a line of interactive textbooks that offer customization, highlighting, easily circulated notes,rearranging chapters and the ability for professors to customize and make additions to textbooks. Dynamic Textbooks can be accessed online, downloaded to PCs, laptops and handheld devices or through POD editions. Dynamic Books are offered for sale at about a third of the cost of print textbooks.
Clancy Marshall, general manager of Dynamic Books, said the “goal of the program is to give students affordable and relevant textbooks. We’re taking these open licensed texts and making them easy to edit and easy for teacher to personalize.”
