College Affordability — Buy Textbooks at Low Price

This post brought to you by Flat World Knowl­edge. All opin­ions are 100% mine.

Are you tired and fed up with increas­ing text-books? Are you not able to afford the text books due to their high prices? Are you not able to con­tinue your edu­ca­tion because of soar­ing prices of text books? Then you must visit Flat World Knowl­edge, the world’s largest pub­lisher of free and open col­lege text­books. Text­books should never become a bar­rier to com­ple­tion of edu­ca­tion. The below sta­tis­tics will give you a bet­ter idea of present situation:

• Stu­dents spent an aver­age $1137 in 2010 – 2011 on text­books and sup­plies, accord­ing to The Col­lege Board
• Accord­ing to the Depart­ment Of Edu­ca­tion, text­books cost almost as much as tuition and fees (72%) for 2 year com­mu­nity col­lege stu­dents. This means 42% of col­lege costs for these stu­dents go to textbooks
• Text­books prices are ris­ing at 4x rate of infla­tion (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Accord­ing to Gates Foun­da­tion study, this is hav­ing a sub­stan­tive impact on stu­dents’ abil­ity to com­plete course­work. 60% of stu­dents who did not grad­u­ate report that text­books and other fees besides tuition affected them; 58% of those who did grad­u­ate cite the same (pub­lic agenda)
• Flat World is using tech­nol­ogy to reduce cost bar­ri­ers and increase access. Pair­ing open licens­ing and text­book per­son­al­iza­tion 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.

Flat World is going beyond lever­ag­ing tech­nol­ogy to reduce cost and using the open license to improve learn­ing mate­ri­als in 2 crit­i­cal ways:

• Enabling fac­ulty to change the text­book from a book to a platform
• Enabling the stu­dent to con­sume con­tent that suits their learn­ing style