On August 20, 2009

Flat World Knowledge: A Disruptive Business Model

It would be difficult to find a more ossified corner of the media industry than the college textbook publishing sector, which is essentially a monopoly controlled by three huge companies that no longer serve any of their constituencies particularly well. They overcharge a captive audience (students) for needlessly thick, poorly edited tomes. They pay the teams of academic authors whose work they word-loaf into the content of these textbooks next to nothing. They cause professors endless headaches by releasing new “editions,” filled with unwanted bells and whistles, on a falsely sped-up publication cycle. Thankfully, there is now a viable alternative to these Pleistocene Epoch companies and their dinosaur-like business model. Flat World Knowledge, the largest commercial publisher of open-source…

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