Textbooks are a major expense college students wish they didn’t have to deal with. Despite being a stack of paper that will only be looked at once, they can cost individuals up to a $1000 a year. Some students try to fight the “system” by sharing textbooks, but disadvantages keep bombarding their plans. When you buy a textbook, you’ll be lucky to even sell it back for half of the original price.
Source: MPI
The publisher Flat World Knowledge is hoping to help students by giving away textbooks for free. Based in New York, the firm recently launched a project to supply four business and economics textbooks online to undergraduates of 15 different campuses. It may seem like a small start, but the results can free a student from the textbook fiasco that binds them.
But will the textbooks have the same content as the thick ones located on campus?
Flat World Knowledge’s resources aren’t different at all. They have been reviewed by academics and are even unique in their own way as some text includes images and video. Since their based online, the textbooks are also open-source; they can be updated easily and changed to match a particular outline or curriculum.
Starting next January, Flat World Knowledge hopes to offer its textbooks to numerous institutions. It’ll be interesting to see how other bookstores and publishers react, since their plan is strongly affects a lot of organizations and companies.
As for the students, don’t be surprised if they never buy another book again.
