"Less than a decade after publishing its first free, openly licensed textbook, OpenStax - Rice University’s educational technology initiative - has saved students $1.2 billion.

"Driven by the belief that everyone should have access to knowledge, OpenStax has published 42 titles for college and high school courses across science, math, social sciences, business and the humanities disciplines since 2012.

I recently purchased the 8th Edition of Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook for $15 and was very disappointed about the PDF View only option. In addition, the e-book is only an abridged version of the large hard copy of the CEHB. You can by a CD for PCs version for $150 that has the complete contents and full PDF view and copy formats. Plus, if the student underground is working properly, the whole class of 45 students can share the CD, illegally of course, but no different than lending out your hard copy.

"Very disappointed in this purchase. I needed this book as a reference and cannot even read most of the charts in it. The charts fill the entire screen of my Kindle but are too light and washed out to read. I also tried reading it on my Kindle for PC with the same problem. The rest of the text is dark and clear, but having unreadable charts makes this book worthless. Buy the hard copy!"