The Affordable College Textbook Act, a bill reintroduced by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) on Oct. 8, would encourage universities to support pilot programs that create digital and print open-source textbooks. Universities participating in the programs would be required to create digital educational resources that would be printable and available free of charge, according to the act.

Angela Pagan

I think NIU should create an open-source textbook program.

As an establishment of education, the university’s main goal should be just that — to give as many students as possible a quality education. It’s universally known that college is not cheap, and that is why we have a financial aid department. Even so, there is only so much financial aid, scholarships and grants can do, so we need to find another way to lower the cost of a college education.

Students drop hundreds and hundreds of dollars twice a year for books, some of which they will only use a few times. NIU would be doing its students a huge favor by adopting an open-source textbook program.

An open-source textbook program would also mean textbooks would be available online, which would also help NIU’s efforts to go green and reduce printing. If students had the majority of their textbooks online, it would solve a number of problems in conjunction with the obvious financial benefit.

I’d have no more back problems from carrying around 200 pounds worth of books and wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting to bring my book to class.

From what I can tell, there would be no negative side to NIU using an open-source textbook program — other than the bookstore seeing less business.

Kaylyn Zielinski

The university should create an open-source textbook program.

I didn’t receive enough financial aid to cover the cost of textbooks, and coming up with the money to pay for my textbooks was hard. I had to wait to buy a lot of my textbooks because I didn’t have enough money to buy them all right away.

An open-source textbook program would make college less financially stressful than it already is.

I just transferred from UW-Eau Claire, and I didn’t have to pay very much for textbooks there since they have a program where students can borrow most of their textbooks for free. I wasn’t expecting to pay more than $300 on textbooks at NIU, so I was blindsided as I’m sure many other students are.

The cost of my textbooks was more than a biweekly paycheck, and it’s hard seeing the money I worked for going down the drain on textbooks — some of which have barely been used. One of my classes requires a textbook with Connect Plus that ended up being about $120. Because it had Connect Plus, I couldn’t buy it used. This class has been going on for eight weeks and we haven’t used the Connect Plus once.

Students could use the money they’d save from an open-source textbook program on something important like putting it away for next semester’s tuition.