Introduction Faculty often find the task of selecting reading materials or textbooks for a course daunting. Instructors can ease the selection process by establishing and following criteria such as quantity, quality, accuracy, currancy, reading level, relevance, and reliability. Whether due to passion for the course topic or simply hasty decision-making, some instructors make the mistake of selecting and assigning an overwhelming amount of reading for their students. Try estimating how many minutes students will need to complete each reading assignment and adjust your selection of learning materials accordingly. Another concern is that information provided to students, especially in printed textbooks, can quickly become outdated.Criteria/Guidelines for Selection of Materials Quality of content, literary merit and format Timeliness Favorable reviews Permanence/lasting value Authority: author Scope Physical quality Format: print, CD-ROM, online, etc. reading level Two major efforts to promote the development and sharing of public domain textbooks are Connexions and Wikibooks. Free Textbook Search allows users to search for free textbooks in 113 sites in English, German, French, Dutch or Swedish. Connexions is a project at Rice University supported by the Hewlett Foundation to promote collaborative development, free sharing, and rapid publishing of scholarly content on the Web. Content is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license. Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project started in 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Collections of books that are freely available include Project Gutenberg, Read Print, Bartleby, Online Books, Electronic Text Service, and the Open Book Project. Project Gutenberg has 20,000 free books in its Online Book Catalog and is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The mission of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. In an effort to promote intercultural understanding, the World Digital Library plans to make available significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The Assayer displays a list of textbooks that are freely available in many disciplines. For an example, see these introductory physics textbooks and Liberte, a first-year collegel French textbook. The Internet Public Library provides a comprehensive list of books that are available on the internet. A video tour of the site is available. Examples of free available eBooks from Bartleby: The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction The Oxford Shakespeare Anatomy of the Human Body The World Factbook, 2003 Online Sapiens Two sources of audio books in the public domain are LibriVox and Loudlit. LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain with several options for listening. Loudlit provides a text of great literary masterpieces as well as high quality audio to help readers improve their spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure. Loudlit literature includes children's stories, poetry, short stories, and novels. Other sources of textbook learning materials are digital collections of institutional repositories at universities and self-archiving by authors on the internet. Some of these include: Scholarship of the California Digital Library MIT textbooks Hofstra University Hofprints-Hofstra University E-Print Archive Cornell Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Project

Activity Experience Identify some learning materials at Project Gutenberg. Go to Wikibooks to identify textbooks in your teaching discipline. Consider using Wikibooks for a class project; read the guidelines. Take a tour of Connexions to find out if it has resources of use to you in your teaching. Reflect Create an account at Project Gutenberg then post your own review of a textbook. Apply Distributed Proofreaders. Help create an eBook. Contribute to Wikibooks by editing pages, creating new pages, publicizing Wikibooks, and many other ways, such as donating.

Review Questions What are the advantages and disadvantages to using public domain textbooks for teaching? What are the most useful sources of public domain textbooks in your discipline and why?

Resources Project Gutenberg The 7 Things You Should Know About E-Books