An Experiment in Open Textbooks
September 9, 2008 – 4:36 pm by Thomas GideonWired has a nice piece on Flat World Knowledge, a company experimenting with bringing some aspects of open content to college text books. The article provides a solid survey of the state of textbook publishing and how Flat World intends to innovate around some of the persistent complaints. I can’t help but think of the core contention of Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma which I just finished.
If consumers have such persistently unfulfilled needs or unaddressed complaints, it forms an opportunity just waiting to be exploited. The only question is how much money the incumbents can muster in their fight to veto the future. In the case of college textbooks, I suspect the answer is rather a lot. Regardless I hope Flat Knowledge achieves enough success to challenge the status quo and net some improvement for poor college students everywhere.
