$8M in Funding and a Lawsuit to Boot? Game on. - Boundless

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“It’s been a hell of a year for Boundless Learning. We’ve raised $8 million in new funding, reached thousands of students with our products and innovated in an industry that’s long overdue for disruption.But whenever there’s a great party, there are bound to be crashers. In late March, we were sued by 3 of the world’s largest publishing companies for alleged copyright infringement.  Don’t worry—we won’t let the fact that someone slipped a lawsuit in the punchbowl ruin our good time (we have a lot more punch). Boundless is committed to bringing educational content into the 21st century, and we remain focused on our mission. We’ve been plugging away in our bunker in Boston for the last year building products that reinvent the way that students engage with educational content. Today, we’re thrilled to emerge and announce that we’ve recently raised an $8 Million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with follow on investments from Kepha Partners, Founder Collective and Nextview Ventures. We’re very proud to be working with such an esteemed group of investors, and this new round will be critical in helping us realize our goal of giving students educational products that are actually built with them in mind. We’re also working with an incredible group of advisors with deep experience in education, publishing and the OER community. Textbooks remain the core content for most courses in higher education, yet they’re completely obsolete: expensive, disconnected relics of an analog age... According to The College Board, the average college student spends over $1,000 per year on textbooks. At community colleges, the cost of textbooks alone can often exceed 50% of a student’s overall educational expenses. Is it any wonder that 7 in 10 college students have skipped buying a required text due to price concerns?... The textbook publishing market is an oligopoly, with over 80% of the textbook market controlled by the top 4 publishers: Pearson, Cengage, Wiley and McGraw-Hill. These publishers have been able to maintain nearly 65% gross margins on what is essentially a commodity product. They have continued to raise prices for this stagnant product in the face of innovation in every other information related industry, growing at a rate of 3 times inflation... In 2008, President Obama signed the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) into law to increase transparency in education and help students navigate the costs associated with pursuing a degree. The HEOA requires, among other things, that textbook publishers “unbundle” their core educational content from optional add-ons like study guides or homework systems. Unfortunately, many publishers have failed to comply with HEOA’s demands. These publishers continue to package their content with expensive access codes to ‘homework systems’—glorified online quizzes that often charge students up to $90 just to submit their required classwork... On March 23, we received word that we’ve been sued for alleged copyright infringement by Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and Bedford, Freeman & Worth... It’s disappointing that these companies chose to open communication with us via litigation. We’re currently preparing our full response, and we believe that the allegations in this lawsuit are without merit and we will defend our company and mission vigorously. These publishers are threatened by innovation and have responded by wrongfully claiming ownership of open knowledge and information. We respect the legitimate intellectual property rights of others, but facts, ideas, and other not newly created material are not protected by copyright and cannot be owned by anyone. Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, has rightly argued that successful copyright policy has to be based on neutrality and should not ‘preserve business models established under obsolete or moribund technologies...’ In higher education, students are the ones who ultimately bear the cost of textbooks, as professors decide which text is required for their course... Every semester, students face the same frustrations—hunting for “custom” editions that are exactly the same as the original text and coughing up hundreds of dollars for “new” editions that offer little significant change from their predecessors. Outside companies have worked to develop more beautiful and engaging digital textbooks—see Inkling, Apple and Kno—but their offerings are stifled by DRM and availability issues. Publishers ‘digital’ offerings are no more exciting. Most digital textbooks published today are little more than glorified PDFs, scanned versions of print content with no innovation or attempts to improve the content consumption experience... At Boundless, we realized that the sad state of the textbook industry is especially startling when you consider the wealth of Open Educational Resources (OER) that has been created over the last 20 years by leading educators and institutions. Top tier universities, professors, and faculty have created amazing educational content, which has remained disconn

Link:

http://blog.boundless.com/post/20543499968/boundless-8-million-lawsuit

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.legislation oa.copyright oa.oer oa.costs oa.students oa.litigation oa.textbooks oa.prices oa.courseware oa.funders oa.fundraising oa.profits oa.cengage oa.drm oa.boundless_learning oa.pearson oa.heoa oa.books oa.libre

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 18:28

Date published:

04/08/2012, 16:03