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Publisher of Free Textbooks Says It Will Now Charge For Them, Instead
An anonymous reader writes "In a surprising blow to the movement to create free textbooks online, an upstart company called Flat World Knowledge is dumping its freemium model. The upstart publisher had made its textbooks free online and charged for print versions or related study guides, but company officials now say that isn't bringing in enough money to work long-term."
Once you get kicked out of your moms house, you need a real business model. Free doesn't always work.
We've seen this very scenario many times before, e.g. CDDB, change.org, etc.
In a perfect world, everything is free and we have an endless supply of lollipops. I bet it's not even a real hard realization that you need to make money to continue operating. What gets people pissed is when companies take obscene profits -- the catch is that we all can't agree on what obscene means. For me, that means I don't buy Apple or soda at the movie theater. And I look for my textbooks second hand ( I like the margin notes, anyway )
For over 15 years I've been paying $24/year for a free-for-life email address.
Paid access isn't going to work any better at all.
Time to do a siterip.
How or when did they expect FREE (with "optional" charges) to start bringing in enough money to work long-term?
Yes we have. Open (anything) source has a history of being difficult to make a living off of.
In the case of software, it has proven difficult, but not impossible. But this is no Red Hat Linux -- it's not someone taking the voluntary effort of millions and wrapping it up in a managed test-and-support environment. Red Hat profits because Red Hat take free and add value. Flat World have taken value (their books) and added free. That's completely back-to-front.
The problem here is not "open", it's "freemium". It's the freemium that never seems to work. The original philosophy of freemium was the idea that on the internet, unit cost was so low that a minority of "serious" customers would pay enough to keep the servers running. A lot of the "freemium" camp has found that freeloaders are actually more demanding in terms of support than they expected, and you can't ignore the guys on the free plan as long as you're hoping that they might one day become paying customers...
If they're still talking about partnering with EdX, though, they may still end up producing free material anyway, but as it will be customised to the EdX courses, it may well become something of an advertising asset, rather than a money sink.
Perhaps this is the way forward for the freemium business model -- limit the "free" version to a part of a wider "free" system. So the free version is "closed", but the paid version is "open". That means turning a few of our assumptions about the word "open" on their head...
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Perhaps this is the way forward for the freemium business model -- limit the "free" version to a part of a wider "free" system. So the free version is "closed", but the paid version is "open". That means turning a few of our assumptions about the word "open" on their head...
Or perhaps they should just charge what it's worth. An online textbook with a large readership should not cost much at all. When things are priced without an over-sized profit margin, people buy them. In fact, if the textbook is old, it is worthless and so they may as well give that away for free. On the other hand a textbook which is continually updated and remains current through expert review is worth a subscription. People who need that kind of currency of information will certainly pay for it.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
For over 15 years I've been paying $24/year for a free-for-life email address.
eh? who's that with? Seriously you could have your own domain plus email form less
I've never heard of Flatworld before and I'm unlikely to in future I reckon. If Baen had done something like this it would have been a blow.
You know, if Google wants to "do some good", and maybe "buy some karma", they could extend some of those fat stacks - along with, maybe, you know, iTunesU Apple - and buy the best-of-breed textbooks in the classics and STEM - basic physics; calculus; english; trig; algebra; biology; chemistry, organic, and inorganic; and then make the source materials for the book available online for peer reviewed update and analysis.
The collective good done to humanity may be beyond measure.
Seriously. The amount of funds involved are relatively small and the books are right there.
..don't panic
Ninite
I assume you remember the URL for google?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Textbooks that are old are worth lots. The newest ones are often worthless .... except that I am speaking from a homeschooler's or tutor's point of view. To a professor with 100 students, it's more important to have everyone use the same book, than for the book to be correct.
He can instruct the students on what to ignore, and why. He can check the answers to problems, and come up with an errata sheet. He can't even hope to read 20-odd different texts, though.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Not charging money doesn't bring in any money.
More at 11.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
were already apparent back in the dot-com days. I guess people never quite learn. Other than that, what we are seeing here is a company doing what is natural; adapting and changing its business model to stay afloat. Move along, nothing to be seen here.
Neither, apparently, did you.
"Free doesn't always work". You say this and this implies that sometimes it does work. Indeed we have several cases of it working very well indeed. That implies that "Free" IS a business case. Indeed, since 90% of all new ventures fail, that a majority of cases of a busniness case fail is no reason to claim it isn't a business model.
Therefore the opener "you need a real business model" is even under your auspices a load of bollocks: FREE IS A BUSINESS MODEL.
That you then have to snide a "Once you get kicked out of your moms house" shows that you're actually immature as well as a dumbass, deciding to go for a rote homily rather than think up something at least vaguely original.
Whoosh, meet Chrisq.
Chrisq, meet Whoosh.
It's the freemium that never seems to work
Tell that to DDO, MapleStory, and any of the zillions of other freemium games that make decent profits on microtransactions.
In fact, if the textbook is old, it is worthless
Ahh that's the problem. I took a university class on pre-civil war american history. That could be updated every month as the historical academic journals publish new papers, but almost nothing would be changed each month and approx zero value would be added, although the price for all that churn would be extremely high. Or you could update the text every generation or so, maybe as what boils down to a PHD's dissertation project. Not sure if that would be an Ed PHD or a history PHD project or a collaboration more likely or .... That's probably good enough, and basically free.
On the other hand, I was forced to take some idiotic IT helpdesk support training type class on Excel '97, which was only one generation obsolete at that time. That textbook obviously has to be completely rewritten every time MS wants to re-cash-in on all the previous Excel sales.
Generally speaking if its a training textbook then an old one is worthless, and if its an education textbook then an old one is perfectly fine.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Free doesn't always work.
Non-free doesn't always work either. I have been involved in many businesses as founder, owner, consultant, adviser, etc. Some based on open source/content, some not. One company I was involved in gave the software away and sold t-shirts. That actually worked fairly well. The trick is to find a revenue model that works before you move out of Mom's basement. Remember that Mom isn't just giving you free rent, you are also getting free meals, electricity, laundry service, etc. Those all add up.
Is this anything like the 'free as in freedom and not as in beer' textbooks? As in, it's okay to copy the textbooks and redistribute them endlessly, just that the first textbook has to be paid for? Or was it originally planned as a 'free as in beer' textbook, until they discovered that their costs don't get covered?
I'm interested in collaboratively writing free (as in beer) textbooks. Are there any groups already doing this (that aren't going to ever to switch to non-free obviously)?
Charge for the errata and addenda.
Hey, Star Fleet Battles (old school shout out) was printed with ring-binder holes for easy re-arrangement when they completed and corrected it, and they once published errata for an addenda.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Maybe you're one of the dimwits who modded the OP up.
Red Hat sell free software. As in you can get it FREE.
Radiohead sold an album FOR NOTHING. FREE.
This business is selling books for FREE.
But all three have revenue.
Red Hat: You can buy the software too. And pay for support.
Radiohead: You can buy the tracks too. And buy special premium content (CDs at the very least).
This business: You can buy the books too. And buy special premium content (Print books at the very least).
If you assume 100% markup, then the bookstore pays $50 for a new book, and sells it for $100. Profit = $50.
You are roughly correct for the gross margins but the net profit is nowhere near $50 in your example. (Rent, utilities, staff salaries, etc) Net profit will be quite a lot lower, probably in single digits to low teens usually if the company is profitable.
Probably with a way to return purchased books to the publisher.
Virtually all new books are sold on consignment. There are a handful of very large distributors in the book industry. They sell to bookstores including Barnes & Noble as well as your school book store. Some bigger sellers like Amazon can go direct but not many others can. New books are sold on consignment with 90 day terms meaning if they don't sell within 90 days they are returned to the publisher. Realistically 90 day terms really means 120 day terms because the distributors have 90 days from the book store and then 30 more days for themselves so the publisher gets paid at best 120 days after shipping a book that there is a good chance will be returned to them unsold. Publishing books is a terrible business to be in from a cash flow standpoint.
Based on your numbers, they'll buy the used book for $30, and sell it for $75-$80 with no way to recoup cost if they aren't purchased (although they probably sell to a wholesaler or something) Profit = $45-$50
There are secondary market options for used books that cannot be sold locally. Not hugely lucrative but they are significantly better than zero. The buyers of used books have some databases which tell them they should pay $30 for Book A and $5 for Book B and shouldn't buy Book C based on what they can sell it for elsewhere. They don't just buy books blindly for a flat fee. (or if they do they are stupid)
/ To be read in the stlye of Lewis Black /
Radiohead are not a start up band. Radiohead, got to the top of their game with millions of sales. Plus millions and millions and millions and millions of marketing cash already invested. My band* tried the same business model, we've sold nothing!!! Also, you're not helping my aneurysm by comparing music and books for a course. Books that you are only buying cos the guy that teaches the class wrote it!.
*Not really in a band - the sales are the same.
You have just touched on what might be the biggest problem -- ebooks. Textbooks are increasingly going electronic, not least because there's a lot of wastage in textbooks (books not sold before the next version are often pulped). If the market goes electronic, someone who only makes money from printed editions is sunk. It may just be that the Flat World guys realise that this is a distinct possibility....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
But that's not really the freemium model, though. That's is more of a "loss-leader" -- a bit like the old razor sales tactics of giving the handle away free then charging through the nose for the blades. The only reason you don't get free razor handles very often is that this sort of sales tactic has been considered illegal market manipulation for several decades.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Red Hat does not sell software, they sell support. Software needs support because it is complex and buggy. Books, not so much. Because Red Hat makes enough money selling support (and much of the software is created by others anyway), they can afford to give away unsupported software. That does not prove 'free' is a viable business model.
Radiohead made a ton of money selling albums the traditional way. The fact that they can afford to give one away for free is no more proof that 'free' is a viable business model than anyone else donating their time to something is proof that free is a viable business model.
Perhaps their popularity and content quality are the main reason of their crisis, not the business model?
I fully understand the naïvety of my Martin Luther King -ish rant, but damn it, it doesn't hurt to dream.
I have this idea, that maybe, one day, when I start earning money and am done with my debts, I will start a charity (or a kick-starter, as it's called now).
You see, I have this idea, possibly naïve, that I will use the funds to outright buy quality textbook rights, or have them written under a patronage system by noted authors, and release those books to the public for free.
I fully realise the flaws in my plan, buying rights of quality works might be damn near impossible, refusal of noted writers to right under a one-off patronage system, crazy licensing issues, non-acceptability of the books produced by teachers, and that's besides the fact that said charity might barely manage to raise funds to publish more than a couple of books.
But darn it, I will at least try.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Fixed that for you.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Maplestory and a huge number of other games really are F2P, its just extra useless crap (like cosmetic stuff) or stuff you can get anyways over time(LoL, TF2, etc) that they charge for
Red Hat has their software with zero motivation to make it better documented, more user friendly or more robust. Every time it fails for a commercial user it is a sales opportunity for them. This is a very perverse incentive for a software company.
Admittedly, Red Hat's software product is pretty complicated. But they could certainly do better in the user-friendly category.
Good software with reasonable documentation and few defects doesn't need a support contract. Having the support contracts fund the company nearly insures the software will be buggy and hard to use.
However, the exact same net/gross difference applies for the second-hand one. His point was that they do still make more on the new book than the second one.
Not necessarily. First issue is that it depends very much on what price they can buy the used book. That amount varies rather significantly and you really can't just assume it is $30 a book. Given how easy it is to get steeply discounted used books through Amazon etc, odds are a bookstore can buy the book for significantly less than that. Second issue is how much of a discount they have to give to sell a used book instead of a new book. In his made up example the numbers work out in favor of new books but that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the real world. Third issue is opportunity cost. The new book is going to cost more (probably) than a used book so there is an opportunity cost associated with locking that cash up in inventory until it can be sold. Buying used books means the store has to buy fewer new books and their cost of good sold decreases. Since they are operating on relatively thin net margins this can matter quite a lot since it potentially frees up cash for other potentially profitable purposes - presuming of course that they can still sell the used book for sufficient margin in a timely manner.
In short, it's not as simple as the example makes it sound.
Software needs support because it is complex and buggy. Books, not so much.
Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily. I think that the problem that these guys had was that they tried to follow the old model, where textbook writing subsidizes the university professor's salary. A more realistic model is for a group of professors to band together to write a textbook (or rewrite one that is in the public domain). That can work because professors are paid based on prestige (i.e. the university is effectively subsidizing the textbook rather than the other way around). However, that model doesn't include a publisher, except one that does print-on-demand (as Amazon and university presses do).
I think that the biggest problem is that near-perpetual copyright means that books have to be quite old before they go out of copyright. That means that all the existing public domain books are out of print and out of date. Writing a book from scratch takes time. Once they have the books, it will probably be easier to keep them up to date under an open source model. Unfortunately, it's hard to get started.
Screw the bastards into the ground.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's "mom's house". If you have more than one mom, then it's "moms' house".
Your code has to compile, so should your English.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Actually technically Red Hat _DOES_ sell software. They just provide the source for free, you have to have a support contract to get the pre-compiled binaries from them ( last I checked anyways - I'm a Debian user myself ). Other distros then take the source / patches and compile and distribute for free.
Again that is last I checked. They may have changed since then, and fedora does not count... that is just BETA testing for stuff they may put in RHES ETC.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Whoosh, meet Chrisq. Chrisq, meet Whoosh.
How is this a whoosh? Care to explain this joke, or do you also pay $24/yr for free email?
Snail mail PO boxes run in that region. Snail mail is ostensibly free delivery.
okay, it whoosed over me too. Anyone care to explain it?
Perhaps he is paying $24 / year to his domain registrar, DNS hoster, etc. (It would be a bit expensive, but it makes a good point)
Other areas of study are constantly rewriting entire portions of themselves - primarily in the science and tech fields.
No they are not, at least the majority of them at entry level. Not much has changed in newtonian mechanics for the 1st semester physics students in a long time. Ditto second semester basic electronics, maxwell's equations remain the same...
Very little has changed in sorting algorithms in Knuth, although trendy language flavor-of-the-month is changed on a scheduled regular basis. Ditto basic crypto math hasn't changed much in decades, although individual applications of the math occasionally appear.
There's a pretty narrow wedge which is shrinking between "old stuff for the noobs thats never gonna change" and "we don't have textbooks, just recently published papers in the field, because the field is too new for a text"
I don't think there is such a thing as "basic molecular biology". That lives in the narrow and shrinking wedge with physics books like Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler ... which curiously because of low demand in the field is also older than I am... We're already in the situation where the highest end stuff tends to be old, vs yet another intro to 101 survey class text being released every year.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I agree about the take free and add value thing up to a point. As an example in the publishing industry, Paizo does just that with Pathfinder (maybe others, I only do the Pathfinder stuff). The System Reference Documents are totally free and online in clear text and extremely searchable, really a much better format for rules than dead tree versions. The SRD are valuable in and of themselves but there is even more valuable when more people use them. In this case the freeness adds value. Paizo then sells the other stuff like print version, modules, adventures, special guides, even figurines and what not. Their stuff is really good. Also the smaller bits are easier buy because they are generally cheaper.
I seems to me that Flat World was shooting for the same type thing. Maybe it failed because it could not get schools and professors on board. I did very little if any extra reading for core/non-major related classes in college; if it wasn't on the syllabus I never even found out about it. Maybe Flat World's quality was mediocre. My point is that there might be other reasons they failed, no just the fact that "freemium" is flawed. If they are in fact working on something with EdX, they might be addressing the issue of expanding the base so that their original business can work.
Radiohead didn't give away any album releases. They sold them online at a price determined by the purchaser. I should know because I bought two of their latest albums to support them (and I'm not even a big fan).
Eyes Open Self-Hypnosis for Victory: Summon the Warrior
And every time I took a course where the book was written by the lecturer, it was one of the most popular books in the world on it's subject, such as "Computers in Communication" by Gordon Brebner (and actually, Brebner was on a sabbatical that year, so it wasn't even "the prof's" book, technically) and Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Components, which was one of only two books in the world on UML at the time.
If your prof's good enough to be a published author, for pity's sake don't moan about it -- celebrate the fact that you're studying with a recognised expert!
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Your initial point seems to take exception to my views, and yet you conclude with a point that is the very reason why I would expect such a response time in the first place.
You seem to want to start an argument over something that it's quite apparent that we completely agree upon.
Oh right.... this is slashdot.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
giving something for free doesn't make enough money? WOW what an incite....
Radiohead asked people to donate what they thought the album was worth.
Free was entirely on the table.
Radiohead gave their album away. Asking you if you would pay is not making you pay.
I signed up for an @writeme.com address, which promised to be free-for-life. There are many, many other domains in that stable which also started out 'free-for-life'. That lasted all of about two years, after which they switched to the paid model.
Needless to say I dumped them immediately. Running my own domain and my own email proved to be about the same price, with the added benefit of many other email addresses, a more personalized address ... and a web server.
Case closed.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
No, it was free for life for a year. Then they changed business model. I only use it as an address, it forwards email to me. Maybe it's expensive, I don't know, it morphed web mail service now but I don't use that part of it. But if I change it I have to change the email address that's trivial to remember and that everyone has known about for a very long time. So I'm paying for the convenience essentially.
(quick check showed that similar services at a similar price, but some free ones out there that seem somewhat fly-by-night)
Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily.
True, but that support is free and aimed at the professor so that they will choose a particular book. This is part of the reason why textbook costs have managed to spiral out of control: those making the decision about which book to use do not pay the financial cost. It is only in recent years that the costs have got so large that us profs have finally started to notice and will quiz the publishers about the cost. However we often find that the cost differences are so small that it makes little difference which text we go with.
There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.
There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.
#1 is actually the most successful model by far. Just do it. Bite the bullet. Write the damn book and put it online for free. Here are some very high quality examples of DIY textbook projects: Hefferon, Linear Algebra, Carroll, Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petkovsek et al., A=B.
The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.
I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?
Find free books.
OK, then it's hybrid freemium/loss leader business model.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Cool! Generate a customer base with freebies, then change your business model to a paid format after thousands have already opted in! Bait and Switch anyone?