Professor fights high cost of textbooks

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A California professor who refused to sell his basic economics text to a commercial publisher is leading the charge to make textbooks affordable.

Caltech's R. Preston McAfee turned down an offer of $100,000 and instead put his economics text online so students could access it for free, The Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

The newspaper says McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are fighting the high cost of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.

McAfee says he wrote his open-source textbook, "Introduction to Economic Analysis," because the traditional textbook market is broken.

While several prestigious colleges have adopted it, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do," he says. "Anything that stands in the way of dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."