Publishing Company to Offer Free Online Textbooks

To help reduce the rising cost of textbooks, which are approaching $1,000 a year for the average college student, digital-textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge will begin offering free online textbooks starting next year.

The publishing company is signing authors it believes are the best in their fields, Flat World Knowledge co-founder Eric Frank told The Chronicle of Higher Education, (“An Online Company Tries an Unexpected Publishing Model: Free Textbooks,” April 24, 2008).

“We want to show professors that they’re not deciding between price and quality,” Frank said.

The online textbooks will include images, audio, and video features, and will be structured as “social learning” sites, meaning students can chat and share notes online while reading and instructors will be allowed to edit the author’s words without permission.

While its electronic textbooks will be free, Flat World Knowledge hopes to make money from the sales of supplemental materials like study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. The company also plans to take a cut of the sales of user-created study materials sold through its website.

But the company will have to find a market. Digital textbook sales currently represent only a small fraction of traditional publishers’ revenue.