No Shelf Required - Blog on ebooks

Sue Polanka is Head of Reference Instruction at Paul Laurence Dunbar Library at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She has been exploring e-book platforms distributors and aggregators. Currently she is investigating open-access digital textbooks.
Open-access digital textbooks are protected by a Creative Commons license and are free to users who give attribution to original authors. What are the advantages?

• keeping content current and timely
• customizing content for a course
• breaking the textbook into granular pieces for instructors to personalize and adapt
• making the content portable and adaptable
• offering students free and lower-cost alternatives to print books

Polanka believes that librarians should get involved with open-access books and can become key players by investigating the offerings, checking the content against existing textbooks and state/national standards.

Options:
CK 12 Foundation (http://ck12.org)  See California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative
Connexions (http://cnx.org) Rice University - thousands of modules for social sciences and humanities (for the higher ed market)
Flatworld Knowledge (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com) 
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (Merlot) (http://ww.merlot.org) 


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