Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Interview
Textbook Publishing in a Flat World
8/6/2008
... Our model is saying, we're going to make less the first time, but we're going to get more students in that class to buy things, and they are going to buy them more consistently over that same timeframe. Our revenue flows over a two-year adoption are very similar to a traditional publisher.
That is secret sauce No. 1. Secret sauce No. 2 is we're also able to significantly reduce our cost of doing business. There is lots of process innovation that doesn't happen in big publishing companies.... I just fundamentally do not believe that we need 350 sales reps to sell, given that our model is so dramatically different. We need reps, no doubt. We need marketing, no doubt. But do we need nearly as much? I do not think so.
Schaffhauser: What's open source about Flat World's scheme?
Frank: There are two major drivers of what makes us open source. No. 1, there's a legal foundation. Our books are still copyrighted, although one difference is that our authors retain their copyright. We do not. They simply license it to us to be able to market and sell under our model. Nonetheless, when we make it available to a customer, we do so under a variation of a Creative Commons license, [which says] some of our rights are reserved and many rights are not reserved. They are given to the customer with the right to create a derivative on that original work.... The only restriction is that they need to attribute their derivative to the original authors and to Flat World; they need to make their version available under the license under which they got it; and they can't make commercial profit--they can't commercialize the thing that they have created.
There's also a technological foundation. You've got to give people a platform in which it is easy for them to make the kinds of changes they want to make. If you think about the average instructor, they have to cut themselves to fit the book and say, "I am going to make a syllabus. It's going to jump around in different places in the book. We're not going to cover that; I'm going to give you a reading on something else or some of my own problems or my own case study."
What we're saying is, "We're going to give it to you on a platform that allows you to make the book fit. You can reorganize chapters by clicking and dragging and dropping the sections. You can delete things at a click of a trash can. You can add your own Word file into our document, and it will paginate, it will be added to the table of contents, it will design it automatically to look like the rest of the book. We're giving them a platform to be able to do all that.
When a customer creates their own version--I just want to be clear about this--is this a Wiki? It isn't. We fundamentally believe that most customers who come to Flat World, they're going to be most interested in the original version of the book that is being authored and maintained by experts in the field that are highly recognized.
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
- Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month
Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
