One cost saving measure for college students: open source textbooks from Flat World Knowledge

September 14, 2:50 PMLA College Bound ExaminerEllen Richards

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According to the Educational Network, students at more than 400 colleges can take advantage of one way to cut down on costs: purchase textbooks from Flat World Knowledge, a leading maker of digital textbooks.

After testing the program in college classrooms during the 2008-2009 academic year, Flat World Knowledge expanded their offerings to over 40,000 students - saving students a combined $3 million this semester alone.

Students can choose to either read the textbooks free on web browers, purchase them in .pdf form for just under $20, obtain a black and white version for just under $60 or an audio version for about $40.

While electronic textbooks may be good for the environment, other e-textbook sources do not offer students a bargain. For example, CourseSmart offers textbooks from numerous publishers - 7,150 titles in all according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

However, a brief crosscheck of CourseSmart textbook prices with the paper version reveals only a slight savings. The main draw of CourseSmart seems to be the convenience of avoiding hauling heavy books.

Amazon has been testing out e-textbooks for use on their Kindle DX and currently Arizona State is one of seven universities participating in the Amazon study. They hope to iron out any glitches before a full fledged launch. 

The prestigous prep school located outside of Boston, Cushing Academy, has decided to create a library without books. Instead, the school is building a "learning center," with, according to the Boston Globe, three large flat screen TVs that will project data from the Internets, special laptop friendly study carrels, and a coffee shop with a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

Cushing administrators believe this leap into the new millenium is worth the price because the school can offer students access to millions of books, rather than the 20,000 it formerly housed.

In a similar move, ABC News reports that Empire High School in Tucson, Arizona is creating a text-book free zone and each student will receive a laptop on the first day of school.

Proponents of this new technology believe strongly that these changes will curtail the problems of purchasing printed textbooks that become obsolete every time a publisher prints an updated version.

Perhaps David Rose of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education said it best when he told an ABC News reporter, "If we continue to prepare kids for their past, that's very expensive. Their future is largely going to be new media. And textbooks are not longer preparing them for that future."

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