Ad-supported Textbooks Are Here

prostoalex writes "Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market. Freeload Press, says the New York Times, will distribute ad-supported electronic textbooks to students of 38 universities. However, it seems that neither professors neither New York Times are impressed with the quality of titles so far: 'The reading difficulty is created by Freeload's use of PDF images, which retain the printed page's layout without reformatting. Navigating around a single superwide, supertall page requires lots of clicking and zooming and patience. The company will soon use improved software that can automatically adjust the text so it is more legible, said Tom Duran, a founder of Freeload Press and its chief executive.'"

Comments

The importance of education

[Colin Smith]

Interesting that it's seen as a source of cost cutting in the US.

Still. Be happy. The world is happy to continue loaning you the money needed to buy their products. Don't you worry yourself about paying it back.

"learn-about-napolean-..."

[Anonymous Coward]

from the learn-about-napolean-and-the-delicious-taste-of-co ke dept.

Can't you people spell Napoleon? And to think some readers here pay for content of such quality...

free textbooks

[bcrowell]

Here is a recent USA Today article that talks about something similar to what you're referring to. Free textbooks aren't hypothetical, they already exist. A sugar-daddy philanthropist isn't required; professors are already doing it for the same reason they've always written textbooks. (Hint: they've never expected to make any significant amount of money on the typical textbook.) Some good starting points:

• theassayer.org
• textbookrevolution.org

I'm currently working on a CD that's meant to convince professors to think about using free books. The idea is sort of like TheOpenCD: all those apps are freely available on the internet, but many people don't know about them, or don't know how to find good ones without searching through a million web sites.

Re:don't know whether to laugh or cry

[AnyoneEB]

The list of completed books is pretty small, but Wikibooks is working on open textbooks. I see they even have PDF version of some of their books. Maybe at some point, it will be reasonable for a professor to use one of those. Then again, it seems like the only time when professors really absolutely require a book is when they assign homework out of it. In that format, it is hard to make the instructor's solution manual difficult to obtain. :)