Open Source Text Book Company Flat World Knowledge Gets Funded
from the disruption-on-the-way dept
We wrote about Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook provider earlier this year, in noting how the textbook market was ripe for disruption. It's great to find out that the company has now received $8 million in funding -- which seems to go against a rash of recent stories from publications about how companies building business models with a big "free" or "open source" component would have trouble raising money these days. FWK, of course, is using free properly -- as a part of a larger business model where scarcities are charged for, but infinite goods are given away freely. Who knows if it will succeed, but it's nice to see the vote of confidence from investors.
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Filed Under: disruption, open source, price, textbooks
Companies: flat world knowledge
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Publishing Scam Artist Friends of WH
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Re: Publishing Scam Artist Friends of WH
Nobody is perfect, but with FW's way of doing things, if an error was discovered, it can be corrected and uploaded right away, rather than waiting for the next printing.
EtG
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editable...
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Can have both quality and open
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Re: Can have both quality and open
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Business Textbooks versus Other Kinds of Textbooks.
Writing a textbook is simply a formalization of the work one does in teaching a course. One writes lecture notes to talk from, and, when rewritten, they become part of a textbook. Likewise, one prepares study questions and examination questions, etc. If you are competent to teach a course at the college level, you are competent to write a textbook for it, and many people simply pass out mimeographed hand-outs as full or partial replacements for standard textbooks, especially in small classes where the cost isn't too important. A textbook is a much simpler proposition than an encyclopedia, because it does not pretend to universal knowledge.
There are lists of hundreds of free textbooks, mostly in science and mathematics. People just write textbooks to teach their own courses from, and generally have them printed up at the local copy shop, and eventually put the books on the internet. Academic scientists and mathematicians don't pretend to be businessmen, and they generally aren't very interested in business models. There is a certain minimum business involvement in getting paper copies of a book at economic prices, but sooner or later, a way around that will emerge.
Perhaps the students will become comfortable studying from computer screens. Textbooks can be redesigned around free educational software, so that the student reads a bit of text and then goes and plays with the software for a while, instead of trying to burn the text into his memory. The whole package of text and software can either be available on a website, or burned to CD-R disks at a cost of about ten cents each.
Perhaps printers will become better. Home computer printers are simply dreadful in a whole series of ways. If they were not dreadful, people could routinely use them to download and print off books. From an engineering standpoint, I've never been able to understand why printers have to be so dreadful. The manufacturer could surely build a print-head with redundant layers of nozzles, so that if one nozzle became clogged the print-head could automatically switch to another. The print-head could incorporate scanner elements to report what the print nozzles were actually doing, thus providing feedback. At this point, you can buy a gigabyte memory key in the drugstore for about ten dollars. It is hard to believe that the cost of a smart print-head would be prohibitive.
A curious thing about Weird Harold's reflex response was that he assumed that everything had to be like rock music, that the motives of a textbook author had to approximate those of a rock star.
Previous post:
http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070813/012132#c321
Also some additional sites:
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://textbookrevolution.org/
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Re: Business Textbooks versus Other Kinds of Textbooks.
Many Universities have business relations with textbook publishers. These relations may include verbage which stipulates textbook requirements for classes held there. I have read about many professors revolting against these rules and allowing the students to use old versions of the textbooks and also producing their own handouts for the class in place of the textbook.
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