Free textbooks. No, it’s not too good to be true. Ever since a St. Paul-based internet company began offering downloadable textbooks that contain advertisements, the concept of kicking costly textbooks to the curb seems within reach.
Freeload Press offers about 20 accounting and finance textbooks, study guides and worksheets, which can be downloaded from the company’s Web site, freeloadpress.com, as free Adobe PDF files.
Tom Doran, founder and CEO of Freeload Press, said the company came out with its first textbooks for class use this academic year. While no MSU professors currently use online textbooks in their curriculum, Doran said several MSU students have discovered the site on their own and downloaded textbooks.
“[Students] love it,” Doran said. “We’re getting rave reviews. I’ve been in publishing for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Not only do we look pretty good in the students’ eyes, but so do the instructors.”
Advertisements in the textbooks, which include fast food restaurants and photocopying services, are limited to 50 ads per 600-page textbook. Doran said the placement of the ads is “really subtle,” as they are embedded in the text in what he calls “study breaks” at the end of chapters.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/28/2006 02:26:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
