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August 16, 2006, 12:30 PM ET
This Tome for Rent
College textbooks are a $6-billion-a-year industry, says the Associated Press, and some students must feel as if they spend almost that much on their required reading every semester. Now an upstart company says it will offer its textbooks free to anyone who doesn’t mind seeing ads along with the educational material.
Freeload Press, in Minnesota, has compiled a roster of about 100 free e-books, most of them on business topics. The texts don’t have the high production values of books from Thomson or McGraw Hill, but they do come dotted with ads for companies including FedEx Kinko’s.
Freeload officials say that the ads will be placed discreetly, and that no alcohol or tobacco products will be promoted. And while some scholars will surely complain that e-books strewn with ads are a bit gauche, students might not mind if the ads can save them a few hundreds bucks on textbook costs. —Brock Read
Categories: Company-Watch, Teaching
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