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Open Source Textbook Company Serving 400 Colleges, 40,000 Students
Posted on | August 20, 2009 | 2 Comments
This is only the beginning:
Flat World is set to announce on Thursday that over 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges are going to be using their digital, DRM-free textbooks in the Fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the Spring.
Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if he or she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by 4,5, or even 6 courses per semester and you are talking big bucks.
By comparison, Flatworld has a pricing scheme that starts at zero for online access via a browser and $20 for a PDF, which they believe will be the most popular format. Printed versions of their textbooks cost up to $60.
Perhaps best of all: textbooks are available a la carte, per chapter.
via Open Source Textbook Company Now BMOC At 400 Colleges | Epicenter | Wired.com.
I believe education and health care are the two industries with the most inefficiency to unleash. There’s such a wasteful value capture by the incumbents, but health care is so highly regulated that it’s unlikely to get more efficient any time soon. The educational-industrial complex is much more open (who thought those words would ever be uttered) and it will get attacked from above by things like Flatworld and from below by things like GeekStack. As people are more motivated to learn and have cheaper, more plentiful resources for learning, we’ll see a big change in the way people value and consume education.
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2 Responses to “Open Source Textbook Company Serving 400 Colleges, 40,000 Students”
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March 12th, 2010 @ 2:35 am
Hai,
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March 12th, 2010 @ 7:18 am
Srinyvas, feel free to link to the original article – this is mostly just a quote from it, not something I wrote.