College students living at or below the poverty line often have difficult choices to make; buy groceries, pay rent or purchase textbooks. To Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, this is not really a choice. When it comes to eating or buying a textbook, most will choose to eat. 

“The biggest barrier to learning on scale is access to information. If we don’t solve that problem, then on scale we are never going to educate the number of people who want to be educated and who are not only capable of excelling but in many ways need that education to improve their quality of life,” says Frank.

But Frank is optimistic that his new textbook publishing model will eliminate those barriers that prevent economically disadvantaged students from accessing information and continuing their education. Frank’s com-pany, Flat World Knowledge, publishes open-licensed textbooks. His model not only allows college professors to choose the book they prefer for their courses, it also allows students to choose the price and the format of the book. What makes Flat World textbooks open-licensed is a set of rights that allow an individual professor to improve upon the book for his or her class. With an open license and with Flat World’s open publishing platform, instructors can create new editions for their students if they attribute the work to the original author, don’t use the work for commercial purposes and distribute their remixed version under the original license.
Like their professors, college students also enjoy a number of free-doms, not the least of which is free textbooks. Students can read Web-host-ed versions for free, or purchase other formats, such as paperback books, PDFs, audio books, e-books and interactive study aids, all for a fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks.
“It’s truly the shift from information and knowledge being a scarce good wrapped up between a cover of books, or in some other physical manifestation, to being an abundant good. Everybody can access this knowledge at the same time, and it doesn’t take away from anyone else. There is this exciting opportunity, I think, to take down these barriers that have existed, and it’s these old business models that were built pre-Internet that are still building up walls around knowledge and content,” says Frank.
According to Eric Weil, managing partner of Student Monitor, a higher education research group, 69 percent of college students purchase new textbooks, 76 percent purchase used textbooks, 10 percent purchase E-books, and 20 percent rent their textbooks. Those who purchase new text-books pay, on average, $83 per book. Those who buy used textbooks pay an average of $54 per book. Students who purchase E-books and rent books spend about $6 and $9, respectively, on their books. The College Board estimates that students can spend from $1,133 to $1,181 on books and supplies per year. The Student Public Interest Research Group, a con-sortium of organized college students, indicates that in 2010, the average price of the 100 top-selling textbooks was $175 for a new edition and$132 for a used one.
To understand how walls and barriers were erected and how the cost of textbooks has risen so precipitously, one must first understand the evolu-tion of textbook publishing. In the late 1970s, there were several small publishers, what Frank calls scholarly publishers. Then in the 1980s, these small publishers were bought up by bigger corporate parents, becoming the “cash cows for those corporations,” says Frank. Realizing that academ-ic textbooks were becoming big business, these corporations invested in large sales forces, complete with sales reps with expense accounts. This investment, however, cost the corporations big bucks, and they passed those expenses on to the student in the form of higher textbook prices.