Flat World Knowledge is a really cool implementation of Creative Commons. They publish textbooks that instructors can customize and students can read for free online.
The textbooks are written by experts. Instructors can customize them for their own classes. They can add, remove and rearrage chapters and even sentences.
Students can read them online for free or choose to pay for other options like print, download for self-print, or audio books. Prices are around $40 — much less than the $150 college students are currently paying for textbooks.
The UI for reading online is pretty good. Nice use of javascript.
Unfortunately, there are few titles available. There is currently less than 20 textbooks in the catalog, and they’re all business related. There are another couple dozen slated for this fall and next year.
Hopefully they can put the $8 million raised this spring into many more titles soon. Even though I’m no longer a student, I can’t wait for more textbooks to come online.
(Bonus: the site is powered by Drupal.)
Hi, I'm Greg. I'm a cofounder of Killer Aces Media. We publish community blogs like