Half an Hour: Predators and Producers: Whither Flat World

In what was probably an unintentional release of the information, Flat World Publishing made the world aware this weekend that it is ceasing distribution of digital textbooks without charge. Readers of Campus Marketplace were the first members of the public to know, but 'The company is making direct calls to many of its bookstore partners.' Flat World CEO Jeff Shelstad told the publication that 'while free access goes away, our mission to be fair and affordable remains as strong as ever.' A lot of people had banked on Flat World providing free access to textbooks, as it had promised to do.  'The only reason I gave Flatworld a chance was because it seemed like a great opportunity to try a text with no risk to the students,' said one commenter on the Chronicle article. 'I made the mistake of adopting before they changed their model with no notice to any of its customers.'  To understand Flat World's change of philosophy, it is important to understand the company's business model. It is neatly summed up in an Inside Higher Ed article: 'Like traditional publishers, it commissioned and paid authors to produce high-quality textbooks, and to market those textbooks to professors to assign in their courses.' The idea here was that the free digital versions would lead colleges and universities to order print versions of the same works, and it would be via the print versions that the publisher made its money. What happened instead was that the world moved to digital more quickly than anticipated. Inside Higher Ed again: 'the shift in gears by Flat World Knowledge suggests that, for one company at least, providing free and open textbooks is not a viable business plan. While company officials hoped that they’d be able to persuade many of the consumers of the basic, free versions of its textbooks to pay for printed copies or versions enhanced with study aids and other add-ons, 'we don’t convert [from free to paid] as much as we used to,' said Shelstad, the Flat World co-founder.' Flat Earth represented the 'have your cake and eat it' school of publishing. It represented the idea that business models would not need to adjust to the digital reality, that you could take a traditional concept - like academic publishing - and simply add free digital content on top, as marketing and promotion perhaps. It's the same model being embraced by the companies that are offering MOOCs, and it won't be long, as a commenter on the IHE article states, before they are offering closed open online courses. 'Once we figure out the right word for 'much closer to free than we are now,' then we should let the folks at Coursera and EdX know. I think they'll probably need it in a few years, when MOOCs turn into MOCs, though at something less than the current cost of tuition.'  There are ways to do free. Indeed, free learning resources will probably carry the day when the smoke clears. But they won't sustain traditional business models. Alex Osterwalder has a nice presentationon SlideShare that makes this point. Consider the alternative business models that can sustain free content ..."