Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Interview
Textbook Publishing in a Flat World
8/6/2008
Schaffhauser: Are there curriculum categories or subjects where this model seems to resonate more closely with the potential authors, the faculty, and the students?Frank: Initially, we're focusing on business and economics. Internally, we just have a lot of expertise in that area, a lot of author relationships that we can bring to the table. It is also a great curriculum globally, so a lot of times, a course taught in this country looks a lot like the business course taught in Singapore. The curriculum travels very well. It is also a curriculum that is taught oftentimes in English around the world so, that adds that global potential for business and economics textbooks. I think faculty is sort of open and receptive to understanding new models and approaches.
Once we establish a beachhead of success, we'll likely begin to identify and publish in other fruitful areas. I think engineering is another one--very expensive books, very global curricula....
There are some markets like science that might be challenging on the cost side for us. The expense of rendering really sophisticated anatomy and physiology images, it might be prohibitive for me in the early years of the business, whereas the cost of typesetting mathematical equations in engineering isn't.
Schaffhauser: What haven't I asked you?
Frank: I do not think about this as a traditional print book versus an e-book. I actually think of [us] not as a digital publisher, although, of course, at the heart of this thing is a digital workflow, but at the end of the day, we're a publisher. We publish books, and when we do, instead of publishing them in one format, which is print, we publish them in multiple formats, which is black and white print, color print, audio, digital. I think that is really the key difference. I think that the key technology that unlocks this whole thing is actually print-on-demand more than anything else because I think that the highest demand is still for a print book. At the end of the day, I want to be known as a textbook publisher with simultaneous formats.
I think the fundamental problem that Flat World is fixing ... is that there has always been this imbalance in this marketplace. A faculty member chooses the book, but he or she doesn't pay for it; so they do not think a lot about the price. As a result, as prices continue to go up, the students are going to be paying. What we're fundamentally saying is, "Listen, professor, you can do your job, take a great book, get a great author, get a great book, but when you make a decision to use a Flat World book, what you are doing is taking great learning material, but now giving your students the choice about how they want to consume it and if and how much they want to pay. Once you have done that, you're fixing this imbalance that exists."
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
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.
