Because books don’t make themselves.

I’ve been meaning to do a quick shout-out to Flatworld Knowledge for a couple of weeks.  We met and had a great conversation with with Jeff Shelstad (one of the founders) at the end of August.  If you don’t know Flatworld, you should.  They are a recent, VC-backed start-up looking to make a significant, sustainable (and in my humble opinion, LONG OVERDUE) change to the world of educational (college-level) textbook market.  The concept is this:

Flatworld produces real, professional textbooks for the college market…across all subjects.  Science, math, art history, etc.  The difference is that students don’t buy Flatworld’s books at their college bookstore.  Or from a rental service, garage sale or Craigslist.  As a matter of fact, they don’t buy Flatworld books at all.  They’re free.

That’s right.  Flatworld text books are all distributed online.  And they’re free.  Anyone can go to Flatworld’s website and start using the online version of the texts.  If you want printed copies, you can buy them from Flatworld and have them shipped to you.

The real win for the users of Flatworld books is that they are completely customizable.  Both by the student and by the professor.  An economics professor can take a Flatworld economics book and edit a chapter based on his course structure.  He/she can add a brand new chapter.  Take three out.  Add links to other web content which helps illustrate the main points of the lesson.  It’s completely customizable by that professor for use with his/her class.  This means that the original Flatworld book (the first version) becomes a platform for each professor.  An OPEN platform.  Each professor can create his/her own version based on each Flatworld book.  And the same goes for the students.  They can edit their books.  Add notes, links, comments, etc.  And their books will live forever online.

Flatworld books solve some major problems.  First and foremost, college textbooks are WAY TOO EXPENSIVE (not to mention really heavy!).  And they’re static.  As soon as they ship to the printer, the content is dead.  It doesn’t change (well until the next edition is created the following year).  And every professor uses the content differently and not all of it applies to every class.  Flatworld books solve all of these problems.

The college textbook publishing business has been an impressive engine for a long time.  It’s not easy to produce, sell and distribute good college textbooks.  It’s actually quite hard.  Arguably a bit too hard.  As a business and industry, educational publishing has gone without innovation for a long time.  It’s gotten a bit stale.  It’s lost a bit of touch with its customers and an evolution (revolution?) is long overdue.  Flatworld (and other…you can read about it in a recent Fast Company article) and leading the charge…

As for the future of Flatworld — we’ll see where it goes.  It’s yet to be seen whether or not their business model will actually work.  They’ll have some hard decisions to make at some point.  For example, they will have to decide whether or not they want to continue to be a publisher or if they want to be a platform?  Do they want to be Pearson or do they want to be the App Store?  Do they want to distribute only Flatworld books or do they want to distribute Flatworld versions of Pearson books?  Time will tell where this develops, but we’re very excited to watch it grow and evolve.  It’s great to see a company pushing the college textbook industry into the future…

Good luck to Jeff and his team at Flatworld.  We’re fans…

Derek