California Takes a Big Step Forward: Free, Digital, Open-Source Textbooks

Give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks:
"Any digital textbooks created under the council's auspices, the new legislation says, must be placed under a Creative Commons license -- which will allow faculty at universities in other states to make use of the textbooks for their own students. And the textbooks, furthermore, must be encoded in XML (or another "appropriate successor format") to facilitate their re-use."