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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.
obviously, people were willing to settle for the electronic books without the physical.
May not even be a case of settling.
I wrote a novel aimed at a small student community, and released the ebook for free. i wanted it to be a gift, so i made the ebook free (creative commons) and also gave away a lot of physical copies to the people i thought would appreciate them most (within a certain community).
the really interesting thing is that i got feedback (remember, from people who i was offering the book to for free) that they were really happy to have the ebook version, but they didn't want the physical book version becase it was 'stuff' that they didn't need. they're students, they move around a lot, books aren't that light, plus they don't really have a place they keep 'things' any more, now they've moved out of home, and probably won't for a few years to come.
now sure, they might not have been interested at all, and been letting me down gently, but it made me realise that there'd need to be more to any future business model i might come up with than 'electronic is free, physical is not'. i know this may seem obvious in retrospect, but i think there's still an assumption held by many people that physical copy = upgrade of electronic copy, and this may not be true.
i'm sure many people on slashdot feel that way already, but mostly i would expect for functional/practical reasons. however, my experience suggests that the sentimental value of a physical book may no longer exceed the value of the ebook, either.
that could be the seeds of an interesting change in our perception of books altogether.
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