This bill, known as the Affordable College Textbook Act, seeks to reduce the financial burden of college textbooks by expanding the use of open educational resources and improving price transparency. It addresses the high cost of textbooks as a significant barrier for students and highlights the potential for open textbooks to generate substantial savings. The legislation establishes an Open Textbook Grant Program , enabling the Secretary of Education to award competitive grants to institutions of higher education or consortia. These grants support projects focused on expanding open textbook adoption, achieving student savings, and maintaining or improving instructional quality and student learning outcomes. Grant applications must detail plans for promoting use, identifying market gaps, ensuring quality and accessibility, and assessing impact, with special consideration given to projects promising high student savings, broad adoption, and high-quality materials for high-enrollment courses. Funds can be utilized for faculty professional development, the creation or adaptation of open textbooks and supplemental materials, and research into their effectiveness. Any new copyrightable materials developed with grant funds must be released under a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license , and made freely available to the public in accessible, machine-readable digital formats, ensuring widespread and enduring access. The bill also amends the Higher Education Act to enhance textbook price information and transparency. Publishers are now required to disclose if materials are open educational resources and provide summaries of student data privacy terms for digital products. Institutions must verify and disclose on their internet course schedules comprehensive information for required and recommended materials, including ISBNs, retail prices, fees, OER status, and links to publisher data privacy terms, while also assisting college bookstores in sourcing lower-cost options. Finally, a Sense of Congress encourages faculty to consider open textbooks within academic freedom principles. A GAO report is mandated within three years to evaluate the implementation of these transparency provisions and the overall impact of open textbooks on student costs and learning outcomes.