BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Every year, right about now, college students and their parents confront an ugly reality of higher education – the exorbitant price of textbooks. From Econ 101 to Biology 101, textbooks can cause up to 200 dollars each.

But in R. Preston McAfee’s undergraduate economics class at the California Institute of Technology, the textbook is free online and just 11 dollars for a print edition. McAfee spent years writing the book and he hopes this model will one day challenge the traditional textbook industry.

He says that these days most textbook publishers try to create a one-size-fits-all book that can be adopted by any university here and abroad, and that means those costly tomes offer very little content or value to his students.
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
Students are more serious than they were 30 years ago, and yet the textbooks have gotten easier and easier. What one pundit said is they've replaced the content with pictures of the people who created the content, and as a result, the books are more like advertising the subject than they are about actually learning the subject. So beautiful artwork, beautiful photographs, much less substance.
BOB GARFIELD:
So in making your book available at virtually no cost, were you responding to what you perceive to be the editorial deficiencies of textbooks in general, with the price that publishers are charging? What exactly were you trying to accomplish?
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
Well, I was asked to teach the Intro class at Caltech and I couldn't bring myself to assign the kind of book that’s available in the marketplace. What books are available are 150 dollars, and I look at that as a wasted 150 dollars.

I could have done like many professors and just labored on without a book, but that’s also sort of not fair to the students. The students like to be able to review material at home.
BOB GARFIELD:
For this to have any significance as kind of an economic experiment, it would presume that there are other people like you who are willing to invest two or three or fours years of their life writing a textbook for no remuneration.
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
I think it’s pretty well known that the business of professors is the creation and dissemination of knowledge, and I'm no exception. I do a fair amount of research, which I then, like almost every professor in America, give away free.

Here, I felt that I could have a bigger impact creating a textbook than in writing more academic papers to be published in ivory tower sort of journals. So I looked at this as being what will give the largest impact for me and for Caltech, who pays my salary.

And I actually, before embarking on the project, went and talked to the person in charge of social sciences and said this is my thinking. Do you agree? And the answer was, absolutely.
BOB GARFIELD:
As you say, your bosses at Caltech have said if you want to invest your energies in a textbook that is great. I'm curious, though, what happens should some commercial publisher want to buy your book and distribute it the traditional way?
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
I've licensed my book under the Creative Commons License, which means for the rest of time it’s available to anyone else to pick up and edit and produce a new version and use as they see fit, provided they themselves obey the Creative Commons License, which means non-commercial use. That is, they can't make a profit off it.

I've actually been approached by a publisher who talked about quite large amounts of money, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is. In fact, because I've issued it on the Creative Commons License, that actually binds me.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now, one of the ironies of all of this is that you’re not some sort of Bolshevik economist. You believe in the marketplace, and yet you’re subverting it here. What’s going on?
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
Well, I don't view this as subversion of the marketplace. I view this as providing a product that the marketplace very much needs, and I'm hopeful that the market will respond and adopt it.

One of the things I had hoped for, but has not really come to pass, was that people would say, yeah, I like McAfee’s book okay, but, you know, I think I can do it better, and that they would then create their own version of it which was superior.

And that kind of competition, taking and building on the base or the framework that I've laid, would produce a book that was truly superior because there were 20 different versions tuned to 20 different audiences. And that’s the business model that I think will truly challenge the commercial publishers.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well I have no doubts that Introduction to Economic Analysis is a pageturner but, if you have no objections, I think I'm just going to wait for the movie.
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
[LAUGHS] Well, there is a podcast, although it’s pretty hard to follow. [BOB LAUGHS] It’s not likely to be a movie.
BOB GARFIELD:
Preston, thank you very much.
R. PRESTON McAFEE:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
R. Preston McAfee is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics and Management at Caltech.