After 10 years working at some of the nation's top textbook publishers, Eric Frank couldn't stomach it anymore.
Now the industry veteran is teaming up with a former co-worker to take on the issue of textbook price inflation. After years of selling high-priced books, Frank's new publishing house, Flat World Knowledge, will give them away.
Faced with rising rates at on-campus textbook stores, students now can get their textbooks for cheap or even free.
By her senior year at Catholic University, Alys Cheatle, a first-year graduate student in genetics and genomics, was ordering all of her books online.
"[I] definitely left the bookstore feeling ripped-off," she said.
But cash-strapped students may not have to suffer expensive trips to the textbook store much longer. With his partner Jeff Shelstad, Fuqua '04, Frank is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Flat World Knowledge-an open-source publishing company that will provide students with free online access to a library of textbooks.
Set to launch January 2009, Flat World Knowledge will commission leading experts to write a new line of textbooks exclusively for the company, Frank said. He added that the books will be available for free online. In addition, students will have the option of ordering a print copy of their textbooks to be sent to them for a fee of approximately $25 a book.
All textbooks published by the company will be copy-written through Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that grants licences that allow for the free distribution of copyrighted material. With this licence, faculty and students will be able to alter the textbooks online and print the personalized editions.
Frank said he believes Flat World Knowledge can match the profits of a traditional publishing company while allowing for the production of equal or higher quality textbooks, greater customer satisfaction and higher author royalties.
He added that the company won't waste money on textbooks with glamorous layouts, designs and illustrations that only distract students and may only be intended to delineate between old and new editions.
Also sick of high prices and distracting layouts, Robert Brown, visiting professor of physics, started publishing his own textbooks decades ago.
Today his lecture notes-online and free to the public-are accessed everywhere from Durham to impoverished classrooms in third world countries, he said.
Textbooks are expensive to put together, Brown said, but it is the publishing companies that reap the majority of the profits.
"The publishers of textbooks make out like bandits," he wrote in an e-mail.
Slackening demand for new textbooks, however, has forced companies like Cengage Learning to pass the investment costs onto consumers, Stephen Hochheiser, vice president of college store and public affairs for Cengage Learning, wrote in an e-mail.
Nicole Allen, campaign director of Make Textbooks Affordable, a non-profit student advocacy group pushing for legislation favoring cheaper textbooks, said traditional publishers like McGraw-Hill and Cengage Learning have done more than just raise prices to compensate for dwindling demand. She said that by publishing new textbook editions as frequently as possible, publishing companies have attempted to undermine the used book market.
Hocheiser, however, said the introduction of multiple editions is a function of demand.
"The market itself, not publishers, determines whether a new revision is necessary," Hocheiser said.
Allen said textbook bundles-textbooks supplemented with CDs, DVDs or other extra material-represent another way publishers attempt to inflate the cost. Publishers often also withhold pricing information from professors in the endorsement process, she said, adding that it is a matter of neither the professors asking nor publishers volunteering the information up-front.
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, passed February 2008 in the House of Representatives, will curtail rising costs and prevent price inflation, Allen said.
Some students said the rising cost of textbooks has forced them away from the bookstore as they look for cheaper ways to purchase class material.
Other students are not as bothered by textbook prices, while some have turned to sites such as Amazon.com to save money.
Senior Samir Derisavifard said he has found ways around high textbook costs. After spending around $300 per semester his freshman year, he started borrowing and sharing textbooks. This year he spent only $120.
Brown said he keeps his notes available for free online because open-source texts make educational capital available to all.
"My notes are heavily used by students in third world countries for whom high textbook prices are a wicked form of reverse social engineering, literally pricing the knowledge required to uplift those societies beyond the means of those within them," he said.
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