Open Source Textbooks Gaining Traction
from the very-cool dept
Earlier this year, we wrote about the very cool business model being used by "open source textbook" company Flat World Knowledge. Basically, you could read the books for free online, but there were also other ways to get the book in other formats where you would have to pay. The company seemed to be gaining traction lately, with a nice round of funding, and now it's being reported that 40,000 students at over 400 colleges and universities will be using Flat World texts this fall. That sound you hear? It's an old stodgy market getting disrupted.Related to this, Slashdot points out that here in California, where the state was running a free digital textbook competition, the results showed that some of the open solutions won the competition and were considered better reference materials than the ones provided by big publishers. In fact, the e-texts from a small company called CK-12 seemed to do quite well -- 3 of the 4 online texts that were deemed to meet 100% of the state's standards all came from CK-12.
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Filed Under: open source, textbooks
Companies: ck-12, flat world knowledge
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textbooks
Of course, that would be wrong...while hosing poor university kids who can barely afford food, well, that's just fine.
back when i was in university, i saved a good chunk of money by not buying most of the textbooks. I would go in the library and read them for free. some of the texts were priced reasonably, so I rewarded those publishers with my dollars. But $150 for 300 pages of tissue paper? I don't think so.
in this day and age, there is no reason why a textbook should not be a reasonably priced PDF file ($10 per student could work, but free would be better)
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This has merit-there is a difference
This is very different from what is being pushed for inventors, where the masses egged on by corporate patent pirates feel entitled to steal inventors work.
It seems to me that it is time for TechDIRT people to start inventing things, that is if the can, and contribute their inventions by publishing them here.
Everyone should be aware that producing and documenting an invention is many orders of magnitude more difficult then whipping up the typical TechDIRT topic.
This is an opportunity for the TechDIRT community to set a good example.
Ronald J. Riley,
I am speaking only on my own behalf.
Affiliations:
President - www.PIAUSA.org - RJR act PIAUSA.org
Executive Director - www.InventorEd.org - RJR at InvEd.org
Senior Fellow - www.PatentPolicy.org
President - Alliance for American Innovation
Caretaker of Intellectual Property Creators on behalf of deceased founder Paul Heckel
Washington, DC
Direct (810) 597-0194 / (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 8 pm EST.
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Re: This has merit-there is a difference
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Ed C.
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wtf happened?
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Talking to myself...
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buy textbook
and free discount coupons too. Their coupons are valid and have saved
over $500 on my textbooks.
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buy textbook
and free discount coupons too. Their coupons are valid and have saved
over $500 on my textbooks.
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textbooks
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Textbooks Are A Rip
As a college student, I know first hand how expensive books can be and how much resources are wasting on printing new editions every year.
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Cheap Books
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