Disrupting the Faculty: The Changing Face of the College Textbook Business

Of all segments of publishing, the college textbook business has seemed for some time now to be the most likely to be disrupted. There are many reasons for this, but the principal one is the spiraling cost of many texts, which has elicited a strong and angry reaction, including legislative action and the creation of rival materials that draw on many of the precepts of the Open Access movement (usually called OER for open educational resources).