"Students taking statistics at some community colleges won't need to shell out $50 for the textbook Collaborative Statistics anymore," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. "Rice University is making the book available free online after buying the rights from a commercial textbook publisher. 'We're hoping that this is the first of many,' said Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions, an open-education effort at Rice that organized the giveaway. He said that even if only a few popular textbooks could be made available in the same way, it would cut costs for thousands of students. 'The top 10 books alone would be enough to ease the burden of most community-college students significantly,' he said."