Company Offers College textbooks for free

“Company Offers College textbooks for free”

This particular article informs the public of the website flatworld.com, a website where like the title suggests allows students to obtain their college text books for free. There are a few more details than that of course the website also offers printed versions of the texts book for up to sixty dollars and offers PDF versions of the text for $20 but students always have the option to read the books on a web browser for free. Another interesting fact is that they offer the books by chapter. According to John C. Abell Flatworld.com started by being patronized by 1,000 students at 30 colleges and now more than 40,000 students at 400 colleges use this website.

“Eric Frank cofounder told WIRED (Abell) that the key buy in has been from the teachers who make the assignments and this can attributed to the economy” (cnn.com, 1). Frank believes it will come down to price especially after new formats are developed for the Sony’s e-book reader and Amazon’s kindle. The Company still aspect the PDF copy to be the package of choice e-book and similar devises are capable of reading PDF formats.

I found this to correlate with Chapter three because it offers a new option for students to use the internet and is a perfect example of how the internet has evolved to facilitate the needs of different individuals.

John C. Abell
Sept. 8, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/free.college.textbooks/index.html