Stuck with huge outlays for textbooks, public school administrators and individual college students are finding relief with online texts and even rental programs.

Textbooks used in California public schools are evaluated by the California Learning Resource Network.

In June, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked publishers to submit free digital textbooks for review. Twenty were submitted; sixteen were reviewed; four met all state standards; six others came close. (Of these last ten, six were published by the non-profit Palo Alto CK-12 Foundation.)

The Network recently released its report, advising school districts to conduct their own reviews. In short, math and science teachers now have free access to ten new online textbooks. How well they work in the classroom remains to be seen.

Teachers can project pages on a screen during class; they can copy some of the pages; or they can have the entire text printed and bound for $18 a copy. It’s no magic bullet, but it does expand options at fairly low cost. To see what’s there, go to the Free Digital Textbook Initiative Review Results page.

College textbooks, of course, tend to cost even more than those used in high schools. Textbook publishers, as well as the students themselves, have been eager for relief.

Mid-August, Justin Pope of Associated Press wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that two new text rental programs are available.

One is McGraw-Hill’s collaboration with Chegg. Chegg will lend out the books and McGraw will share in the revenue.

The other is Cengage Learning. It offers immediate electronic access to the first chapter of the text rented. Then the book is shipped. At the end of the term students can return the book or purchase it.

Also, six universities are running experimental programs using Amazon’s Kindle. More will be revealed…..