Will someone please shrink the populations of California and Texas? It’s frustrating that the tastes of big states so often shape K-12 textbooks elsewhere. But what if schools customized them?
Perhaps there’s hope at the college level, where the Wall Street Journal and USA Today both have stories on the recent customization trend.
One downside, of course, the risk that some professors will insist on homegrown productions to collect royalties. Same for departments within universities.
Meanwhile Flat World Knowledge is unveiling an innovative new textbook service, and ahead I’ll excerpt from material the company provided me. In a nutshell, a beta including hundreds of U.S. college students will test "free and open textbooks." It’s to be the biggest test of this kind. Customization, as you’d expect, will be among the options.
Flat World Knowledge—I love the name—will make its money through sales of supplemental items such as podcasts and printed texts. Authors are supposed to be as expert as the usual bunch. Sounds intriguing, just so things in the end are still much cheaper than the current mess.
FLAT WORLD KNOWLEDGE CHALLENGES TEXTBOOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY; OFFERS FREE TEXTBOOKS TO COLLEGE STUDENTS AND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR PUBLISHING
…Flat World Knowledge’s free and open textbooks will replace traditional textbooks in a single class or class section at each participating institution. The beta test begins this August and will run through the completion of the Fall 2008 semester.
Flat World Knowledge has built a business model around offering free textbooks to college students.Through their open platform, students will have access to complete textbooks free of charge, with the option to purchase affordable alternate formats of the content (i.e. print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.).
…Flat World and its authors earn compensation by offering affordable choices to students beyond the free online book, from printed textbooks for under $30 (printed-on-demand), to audio books for under $20, to downloadable and printable files by the chapter, and more. The company supplements its texts with low-priced study aids like DRM-free podcast study guides, digital flash cards, interactive practice quizzes, and more.
