This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Flat World Knowledge for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
This is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. If you attend a university or college you know that tuition and textbooks keep getting more expensive. Sometimes this causes instructors to try to pick a cheaper book over a better but more expensive one, or to cut down the number of books for a course because of expense. They are trying to help their students but it is hard not to wonder if they are sacrificing the future for help now. A solution would be a revolution in text book publishing and access.
That solution is Flat World Knowledge. It’s an open license publisher that allows publication of licensed texts to a web server that students can access but that protects the copyright of the author.
Along with it’s open licensing approach Flat World Knowledge has implemented a textbook personalization and rendering tool, change the textbook from a boring object to a living, dynamic learning platform. You get professionally published textbooks published under a Creative Commons open license, transferring legal control to faculty.
Flat World’s breakthrough “Make It Your Own” (MIYO) Platform enables faculty to drag and drop chapters and sections to reorder the book, delete material, edit anything in the book down to the sentence level, and insert new content including audio and video multi-media from sources like YouTube and BlipTV.
Flat World’s open licensing and textbook customization with a radical pricing model gives a formula for disrupting an $8.5bil U.S. textbook market. Books are free online, while offline books cost around $35 for print, and $25 for other formats. For the first time, students can choose the format and price point best for them
I truly believe that this is the future of text books. The expense of books is mostly from the publishers and the giant and expensive printing operations that are required. They have raised over $27mil over the last 2 years in venture capital from investors including Bessemer and BDMI, so I’m not the only one that believes in them. Flat World Knowledge gives the students access inexpensively and gets the profits to the author instead of the publisher. You should get all your instructors to check it out.
