Monday, September 7th, 2009
The new textbook publisher
I teach a couple advertising classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and am constantly looking for better textbooks. When I review desk copies of books I always ask about digital versions or other options for students besides hard copies. Many academic texts are very expensive and are consistently replaced with newer versions. In journalism and mass communications it is necessary for our students to have access to current information. Web site, blogs, and newsletters from trade pubs are great but lack the structure for students. There are many print-on-demand, publish your own, and build your own text books, but one has a great model for future textbooks.
So I read about Flat World Knowledge which offers its text books for free that you can read online. They sell print-on-demand copies of their texts as well as mp3s of the text that you can buy per chapter or the entire book. The print books can be bought in black and white or full color. They also offer a variety of supplemental materials as well. This is cool because students can customize how they would like to interact with the text making the classroom a good place for discussion, interaction and application.
The flexibility of this service is wonderful, but on downside that I see so far is the size of the library. Currently, there are only a select few texts, but as it expands it will become quite the resource for both instructors and students.
