Determining textbook cost, formats, andlicensing with Google books API: a casestudy from an open textbook project
2019
The rising cost of textbooks for students has been highlighted as a major concern in higher education,
particularly in the US and Canada. Less has been reported, however, about the costs of textbooks
outside of North America, including in Europe. We address this gap in the knowledge through a case
study of one Irish higher education institution, focusing on the cost, accessibility, and licensing of
textbooks. We report here on an investigation of textbook prices drawing from an official college
course catalog containing several thousand books. We detail how we sought to determine metadata
of these books including: the formats they are available in, whether they are in the public domain,
and the retail prices. We explain how we used methods to automatically determine textbook costs
using Google Books API and make our code and dataset publicly available.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI