Mount Hood

Help Lower Textbook Costs for Students

Are you an instructor who’s concerned about the impact of high textbook costs on your students?

Open Textbook

Did You Know…

  • The high cost of some course materials can impede students’ academic success.
  • The cost of textbooks is rising at a rate of 4 times inflation.
  • Seven out of 10 students don’t purchase a required textbook during their academic career because of cost.
  • Sixty percent of students have delayed purchasing textbooks until they’ve received their financial aid.

Open Textbooks

Open textbooks can help alleviate the burden of textbook costs for students and provide faculty with content that can be customized for their course. Open textbooks are full, real textbooks, used by many faculty across the country, and licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed.

What You Can Do

Attend Open Oregon’s virtual Open Textbook Workshops. The one-hour session will provide information about open textbooks and how to find discipline-specific titles. After the workshop you can earn $200-$300 by writing a review of an open textbook or other open materials. If you have already attended a past workshop and want to write another review, contact Sue Kunda to request a new survey link.

Meet your Hamersly staff: Myranda Sawyer

Each term, we introduce you to a few of the people who work to make Hamersly your favorite place on campus to do research, study, print your papers, meet with a group, or simply kick back and read in a quiet place.

This week, meet Myranda Sawyer, one of our excellent student employees who is leaving us at the end of this term to complete an internship before she graduates in the spring. Thanks for all your hard work, Myranda!

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Myranda

What do you do in the library? I’m an Information Desk student worker
How long have you worked in the library? One and a half years
What is your major and year in school? I’m a Criminal Justice major, and I’m a Senior
What is one thing about the library you think everyone should know? That you can order most of your textbooks from Summit, and the best part is, it’s free! It’s a great way to save a little extra money, sometimes a lot of money depending on the textbook. 🙂 Just ask someone at the Information Desk and we will show you how.
What is the last good book you read? At the risk of sounding like a nerd, the last good book I read was for one of my Criminal Justice classes, and it was called There are no children here by Alex Kotlowitz. It is about a young man growing up in the inner city of Chicago and all of the things he had to go through at such a young age. I highly recommend it!
What was your favorite book as a kid? I had too many favorites when I was a kid. Pretty much any Dr. Seuss book was my favorite.
Tell us a fun fact about you! I used to play three instruments: the saxophone, the tuba, and the bass.