I suppose it was inevitable, but the news today that with textbook prices soaring into the hundreds of dollars, some students won't be paying a dime the Fall. Why? Because their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee. If you think about it, selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, this hasn't spread to college textbooks - partly for fear faculty would consider ads undignified. The result is that textbooks can cost students about $900 per year. Now, a Minnesota startup is having a go at the $6 billion textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall - mostly for business courses - completely free. Anyone who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF of the book, which they can store and print. Freeload doesn't yet have a stable of well-known textbook authors, and it lacks the marketing muscle of the "Big 3" textbook publishers (Thomson, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill). But you know what, good luck to them, the cost of a decent education in this country continues to go through the roof. And anyway, once you’ve printed out the book, you can always rip out the ads and throw them away. After all, that’s what we do every Sunday morning with the fifty pounds of ad inserts we dump from the newspaper.
1936 Domestic Science textbook, proving there's nothing new in the ad biz!
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