Value pricing comint to text book market ?
(Known in economics as price discrimination or price differentiation)
"We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks" in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. "It seems to me we could put that all online for free."
The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.
"Today, we are engaged in a very different dialogue with our customers," says Wendy Colby, a senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "Our customers are asking us to look at different ways to experiment and to look at different value-based pricing models."
Eric Frank, the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, argues that there is a huge financial opportunity in outflanking the traditional textbook makers. His company homes in on colleges and gives away a free online version of some textbooks. Students can then pay $30 for a black-and-white version to be printed on demand or $60 for a color version, or they can buy an audio copy.
About 55 percent of students buy a book, Mr. Frank said, adding that the leading calculus book from a traditional publisher costs more than $200.
Publishers have started de-emphasizing the textbook in favor of selling a package of supporting materials like teaching aids and training. And companies like Houghton Mifflin have created internal start-ups to embrace technology and capture for themselves some of the emerging online business.
They are responding in much the same way traditional software makers did when open-source arrived, by trying to bundle subscription services around a core product that has been undercut.
Ms. Colby of Houghton Mifflin puts the state of affairs politely: "I think the open-source movement is opening a whole new conversation, and that is what is exciting to us."
Technology
$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math.
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: July 31, 2010
Two founders of Sun Microsystems have created two nonprofits to bring open-source textbooks to kindergarten through high school classes.