Going through my old emails has proven really fruitful - came across this article from Digital Textbooks

The new legislation encompasses two bills: One, a proposal for the state to fund 50 open-source digital textbooks, targeted to lower-division courses, which will be produced by California’s universities. (Students will be able to download these books for free or pay $20 for hard copies.) The other bill is a proposal to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host those books.

Holy hell.  And that’s not even the most exciting part:

The new law will also be something of a technological experiment — and an intriguing one, at that. For one thing, it makes a point of extending its impact beyond California’s borders. 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.

So… when these things are done, Nazarbayev University can hopefully use them, and avoid all of the textbook-purchasing issues we ran into at the beginning of the semester.  THANK YOU, state of California.