An Online Company Tries an Unexpected Publishing Model: Free Textbooks

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

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The high prices of textbooks, which are approaching $1,000 per year for an average student, have those students and their professors crying for mercy. Yet publishers say their cheaper options—electronic versions of traditional texts—aren't selling.

Enter Flat World Knowledge. Starting next year, the new digital-textbook publisher will offer online, peer-reviewed, interactive, user-editable textbooks, free of charge. The catch? It's not clear whether they can make any money doing so.

"We are finding and signing authors who we believe are the best in their fields," said Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World, which began its first peer review of textbook content last week. "We want to show professors that they're not deciding between price and quality."

Flat World hopes to leverage the availability (and hoped-for popularity) of these free books to make money by selling materials that supplement the online texts, such as study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. They will also take a cut of sales of user-created study materials sold through the Flat World site.

The books will include images, audio, and video and will be structured as "social learning" sites, meaning students can chat and share notes while reading. Instructors who adopt the books can also edit the authors' words without permission.

Flat World is not the first commercial publisher to offer digital textbooks, or even free digital textbooks. Plenty of major traditional publishers offer their best (and worst) sellers in digital formats, such as through CourseSmart LLC. There is even an ad-supported free-digital-textbook publisher, Freeload Press, whose current offerings are primarily ones that failed on the traditional market.

But for traditional publishers, digital-textbook sales still represent only a small fraction of their revenue. "The publishers are format agnostic," said Stacy S. Skelly, director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers. "They could go completely digital tomorrow. Unfortunately, the market's just not there."

What Professors Want

Students who opt for digital versions of traditional texts often choose them for pricing reasons, as textbook costs per student average $900 a year, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups. Digital versions of texts typically run about half the price of new hard-copy books, Frank Lyman, executive vice president at CourseSmart, said.

While greater comfort with traditional books appears to be holding back digital sales, greater use of electronic books in primary and elementary schools across the country may soon start predisposing incoming freshmen to digital texts, said Albert N. Greco. a professor of marketing at Fordham University's Graduate School of Business who studies academic publishers.

Of course, it is professors, not students, who choose course texts. Some professors say they are growing increasingly sensitive to students' price concerns, which preclude some students from buying a textbook altogether.

"With new editions released on a more-frequent basis these days, I've felt that students are being taken advantage of," said Carl Bergemann, a business instructor at Arapahoe Community College, who eagerly signed on as a peer reviewer for Flat World. "Because of that, last semester I didn't use any textbooks, just articles from the popular press."

Most professors still consider text quality and supplemental materials a higher priority than price when selecting course materials, Mr. Greco said. To appeal to those interests, Flat World will offer free teaching supplements and allow instructors to edit texts to their liking.

While this model may not appeal to some authors who have spent years slaving over their texts, other authors see it as a welcomed means for continuous peer review.

"I'm not perfect, maybe close, but not perfect," said Michael R. Solomon, a marketing professor at Saint Joseph's University who has written an advertising text for Flat World. "If someone has a better way to express a concept, I'd like to know."

Some observers say that authors like Mr. Solomon may not have to worry about other professors corrupting their work because "changing little things takes too much time and effort, and I think a lot of instructors are lazy," said J. Edward Ketz, an associate professor of accounting at Pennsylvania State University's main campus who is reviewing an accounting textbook for Flat World.

Mr. Solomon himself will also be updating the text as he follows an ad campaign run by a firm that is cooperating with Flat World.

Mr. Frank and his co-founder Jeff Shelstad, like the leaders of Freeload Press, collectively spent decades in the traditional textbook industry, most recently at Pearson Prentice Hall, before starting Flat World. Mr. Frank said they were leveraging their connections to get "authors who have existing best-selling books with other houses."

The first books, which are planned for a January release, will be business and economics textbooks. Then, Mr. Frank said, he hopes to publish texts for other disciplines. That is, if the company can recoup the major upfront costs of producing a top-notch textbook.

But skeptical observers, including those who work on digital texts, think all the digital hurdles may be hard to surmount.

"I can't imagine anyone taking this seriously," said Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank based in New York. "My reaction would be that either they're not spending much money to produce these books, so they're not of value and they're giving poor kids the short end of the stick once again. Or, they're going to overprice these ancillary things."

But, he added, "I don't understand what's going to make anybody buy those in the first place."