Flat World Knowledge Gets Bertelsmann Investment

Bertlsmann are putting in $15m funding for Flat World Knowledge, a college textbook publisher seeking to commercialise “open source” educational material. We have watched Flat World Knowledge, since it first appeared on our radar in 2008 and we wrote about it,‘Flat Meets Round World Head On’ and the world of creative commons attribution licence (CCAL). We then wrote about it securing $8 million of investment and later in 2009 we covered 'Wired's' update on the company.

Flatworld pricing is based on an 'a la carte' model where online can be free, a PDF some $20 and a printed rendition of the same textbooks could cost up to $60. Flat World’s use of Creative Commons licenses also is not just to the student to allow unencumbered non-commercial use, but also the lecturers to add supplemental material.

Now $15million of investment funds from Bertelsmann and others such as Bessemer Venture Partners will enable FlatWorld to expand its offer to include the 125 most popular courses on college campuses. Flat World are very well positioned to exploit open digital textbooks with a model that significantly reduces costs for students whilst also giving professors greater control over the content.It also signals Bertelsmann’s intent to move into the world of education.

This is a Rights Business

This weekend saw an interesting letter published in The Daily Telegraph ‘Books on Demand’. The letter focused on print on demand and claimed that, ‘Publishers appear to be selling material that is freely available online to extract money from unsuspecting book buyers.’

The complaint was against ‘publishers’ and was in danger of tarnishing all with the same brush. Ruth Allen was rightly annoyed to discover that a $15 Print on demand book in the US which she claims was a copy of four of her articles, which were largely her work and made freely available over Wikipedia under their Creative Commons licensing copyright agreement. She objects to her altruism being used by others for profit but as we were unable to find the material under her name on Wikipedia, it is almost impossible for us to validate her claims.

We fully support Creative Commons licensing and its fair use, but respect that its unfair usage may be difficult to control in this digital age where exploitation is merely a click, or a short ‘low risk’ print run away.

We recently discovered a more traditional book work that had been republished as a print on demand rendition by its publisher, even though the contract did not permit that, reversal conditions had been met and the request for a reversal had been ignored. We only discovered the infringement by accident and the situation has been now resolved. The question is, how much infringement is now creeping back under the print on demand long tail.
We wonder if we will all be spending more and more time monitoring and searching for infringements in the future, with more and more take down notices being issued retrospectively. The Scribd and Wattpad platforms have demonstrated how easy it is for some to infringe and also how difficult it is for all to proactively manage content. In addition to the online threat we also now have a growing print on demand environment which itself is creating ‘low risk’ opportunities to publish first at little risk and be dammed.

We now talk about term licensing of digital rights but who will know when the term has expired? We openly dispute to volume of orphan works out there with the numbers often varying according to the position taken on their adoption. It is becoming easier to scan and copy books and torrent sharing is here today. There has always been serious book piracy, it is not new but just getting easier.

Some would suggest that a rights business without a rights registry in a digital world is an open door for those who wish to exploit it and a nightmare for those who want to protect their property and rights. We are no experts on copyright but would suggest that there must be a better way than expecting the owner to spend their time ensuring that the rights have not been infringed

Further Education's Digital Tectonic Plates

We were recently in Iceland which among other things is living proof that tectonic plates can collide, or pull apart and from it can come benefit. In Iceland’s case it is free energy. The tectonic plates between free and paid for Further Educational content is equally fraught and offer much for all, but some would suggest that we can’t wait for nature to take its course on this occasion.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has reported the findings of its ‘e-books for Further Education (FE)’ research to make 3000 e-books freely available to every college and sixth form in the UK. In the next 5 years, the project aims to enable all students in FE in the UK to access online course texts to support their studies.

The research studied UK student usage of 36 online textbooks at 127 universities during the period November 2007 to December 2008. In that time, 46,000 visits were made and more than 761,000 pages were viewed. More than 50,000 university staff and students were surveyed. The e-books on offer via the project were chosen by ballot system by colleges across the country, with more than 80,000 votes cast. It also compared print sales of the same textbooks during the period which fell during the print-sales-only period 18.7% and fell 13.7% during the subsequent free-access period.

The study recommends that publishers develop better e-text platforms, which could include removing digital rights management, making content available to plagiarism detection software vendors, and having e-books include and conform to ISBN standards. It claims that many students viewed the texts online, and did not download them even though downloading was an option. Most of the textbooks were scanned for content, not read completely, and the incidence of cutting and pasting information was high. This is very interesting as it would support the view that online is important and that online is used for reference and mashing of text. It would indicate that merely replicating the physical book as an ebook may be not what is required. This clearly presents many publishers with not a DRM issue but a rights issue as it suggests that it isn’t the content that needs protecting but the rights cleared to facilitate mash-ups which is a subtlety but different perspective.

JISC wish the new ebook titles to be available to students at anytime, anywhere which again raises some interesting issues. Colleges will also be able to build a digital library of e-books tailored to meet the needs of all its students and buy additional e-books at specially discounted prices to add to their collection. What is not clear to us is whether all the books will be made free under the same terms or will the additional ones be restricted?

It is hoped that the results will give publishers the confidence to release more e-books. We see both pluses and minuses here as there should be the realism that students with little discretion always buy what is required for their courses. However we note that they still want print and this would suggest that the Flat World Creative Commons approach would make sense. This suggests that there is an opportunity for superior product development and integration.

Details of how to subscribe to the online catalogue

Details of the e-books for FE project can be found at JISC

The Flat World Expands

Just under a year ago we wrote a long article about Flat World Knowledge, ‘Flat Meets Round World Head On’ and the world of creative commons attribution licence (CCAL). Flat World Knowledge is a new venture foundered by two very reputable publishers Jeff Shelstad and Eric Frank.

Then earlier this year we reported that Greenhill SAVP had invested $8m Series A financing in Flat World Knowledge.

Now Wired gives us a healthy update on this innovative company’s progress. It reports that Flat World now claim 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges are going to be using their digital, DRM-free textbooks in the coming semester, up from their beta of 1,000 students in 30 colleges in the last semester.

Flatworld pricing is based on an 'a la carte' model where online can be free, a PDF some $20 and a printed rendition of the same textbooks could cost up to $60. Flat World’s use of Creative Commons licenses also is not just to the student to allow unencumbered non-commercial use, but also the lecturers to add supplemental material.

Flat World now are working on supporting the likes of the Sony e-book reader and Amazon Kindle and plan to use their most popular format the PDF to achieve this. It will be interesting to watch how the most widely supported digital format, PDF, promotes a DRM free textbook in a flat world.

Textbooks for Free?

First we read about Bloomsbury Academic’s announcement that they will begin publishing monographs in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. What is different is that they intend to build a lists that will be available on the Web free of charge under Creative Commons (CC) licences. Creative Commons is a non for profit service that provides free tools to let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. Authors can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Simultaneously Bloomsbury Academic will produce physical books on a print on demand basis for sale around the world. Bloomsbury is the first major publishing company to open up an entirely new imprint to be accessed under CC on the Internet. This interesting development, is risky and works if the demand for print copies can be achieved efficiently within the POD model.

Then we read in the New York Times about the high prices for academic textbooks and the back lash from one Professor R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech. McAfee in protest of what he believes are high priced textbooks and the dumbing down of their content, has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He claims the book could have earned him a a $100,000 advance. Professor McAfee however allows anyone to download a file of his book, and also has permits print on demand sales via Lulu and Flat World Knowledge. Lulu charges $11 and Flat World between $19.95 and $59.95, significantly lower than the probable list price of around $200 .

In another venture, Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University has received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to publish free textbooks under a program called Connexions. Connexions uses CC license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Connexions is strongest in statistics and electrical engineering attracting around 850,000 unique users a month, with more than 50 % of the traffic originating from outside the United States.

In response the biggest five sector publishers have created a service called CourseSmart. It provides a service where students can subscribe to currently over 4,000 textbooks, read them online and have the option to highlight and print portions of a book at a time. CourseSmart is a publisher solution that some may say makes the big publishers bigger whilst marginalising the smaller ones. What CourseSmart wants to be when it grows up is questionable. Another issues is whether a co-operative of publishers can retain and grow a collaborative business and whether that will remain exclusive or open itself up to include others and if so , on what terms?

What model will prevail is uncertain but what is clear is that the current model and pricing isn’t working and is being attacked from multiple angles. It is not just about pricing but the relationships with the creators and the readers or users of the material. What also comes into play is the buying process which often involves inspection and adoption where between 10 and 20 % of an initial print run could be ‘given away’ in order to get adoptions. Digitisation offers much, but like many publishing processes today, it is less about tweaking at the parts but understanding the total process and maximising the opportunity.