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Interview
Textbook Publishing in a Flat World
8/6/2008
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If the student wants to buy a printed copy of the textbook, it will be printed on demand by the company and provided in color for one price or black and white for a lesser price. For the student who prefers to listen to the book on an MP3 player, audio versions will be available too. Each format will have its own cost structure, but on average, it'll tally up to about $30.
In this interview, Co-founder and CMO Eric Frank explains how he and Co-founder and CEO Jeff Shelstad expect to make money following an open source model of publishing and why faculty members from 15 schools--among them, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Houston Baptist University, Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, CO, and Santa Ana College in California--have signed on to add one of the Flat World textbooks to their courses as part of a beta-testing phase.
Dian Schaffhauser: What do the economics of the Flat World textbook look like?
Eric Frank: There are two major factors that play in our economics. We build our model on the average student spending $35. That means some will spend zero; some will spend $50 or $60. Most of that revenue is renewable. Certainly, some [books] will come back into a used book market, but they are a far lower volume than a traditional market because there isn't sufficient margin on those used books for the big players to aggressively jump into the game.
If you take an average course of 100 students and you take a traditional publishing offering, that first semester that new edition is available, they sell a new book to 80 students. Twenty buy nothing because it is too expensive, and they just don't see the value. Then, that 80 turns to 48 the next semester, roughly speaking. What happens is that used books displace about 40 percent of the sale each subsequent semester that the book is out.
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