Elizabeth Kennedy is the director of development for the University Libraries at the University of Houston. They are creating Open Educational Resources (OER), teaching and learning resources – aka textbooks – that are published in the public domain. This means that anyone can freely use and re-purpose them. When a single textbooks can cost more than $120 and amount to over $1000 of necessary purchases for college students, many are left without the books they need. UH is incentivizing the program to compel professors to create and use open textbooks in their courses. It's been a tremendous success thus far and they're just getting started. It also has the advantage of cutting out the greedy, corrupt academic publishing industry. What's not to love!
Go to www.libraries.uh.edu for info on how you can take advantage of their system and participate in creating textbooks.