Free Software Linux

As we recently reported, the traditional textbook publishing industry is being challenged by a growing movement of offering online versions of textbooks. Flat World Knowledge is leading the charge. The company is in the midst of private beta testing for offering "open college textbooks", a service that aims to provide expert content that can be modified by users via open source for free. We spoke with Eric Frank, founder and chief marketing officer of Flat World Knowledge about their radical educational mission.

There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is wide and deep. Open textbooks are freely editable, downloadable and repurposable by others, keeping with the notion that the search for truth in any academic field is continually being revised, especially in the science and technology fields.