by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 2008.
Excerpt:
The high prices of textbooks, which are approaching $1,000 per year for an average student, have those students and their professors crying for mercy. Yet publishers say their cheaper options—electronic versions of traditional texts—aren’t selling.
Enter Flat World Knowledge. Starting next year, the new digital-textbook publisher will offer online, peer-reviewed, interactive, user-editable textbooks, free of charge. The catch? It’s not clear whether they can make any money doing so.
“We are finding and signing authors who we believe are the best in their fields,” said Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World, which began its first peer review of textbook content last week. “We want to show professors that they’re not deciding between price and quality.”
Flat World hopes to leverage the availability (and hoped-for popularity) of these free books to make money by selling materials that supplement the online texts, such as study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. They will also take a cut of sales of user-created study materials sold through the Flat World site.
… Mr. Frank and his co-founder Jeff Shelstad, like the leaders of Freeload Press, collectively spent decades in the traditional textbook industry, most recently at Pearson Prentice Hall, before starting Flat World. Mr. Frank said they were leveraging their connections to get “authors who have existing best-selling books with other houses.”
The first books, which are planned for a January release, will be business and economics textbooks. Then, Mr. Frank said, he hopes to publish texts for other disciplines. That is, if the company can recoup the major upfront costs of producing a top-notch textbook.
But skeptical observers, including those who work on digital texts, think all the digital hurdles may be hard to surmount.
“I can’t imagine anyone taking this seriously,” said Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank based in New York. “My reaction would be that either they’re not spending much money to produce these books, so they’re not of value and they’re giving poor kids the short end of the stick once again. Or, they’re going to overprice these ancillary things.”
But, he added, “I don’t understand what’s going to make anybody buy those in the first place.”