Free Internet textbooks come with a catch: ads
As the cost of textbooks continues to rise, a St. Paul-based Internet company is offering a free, downloadable textbook with advertising for fast-food restaurants and photocopying services.
2006-04-24
By Steve Alexander, Star Tribune staff writer [published in the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, 4/23/2006]
One company is turning the information highway into the road to learning, including billboards.
As the cost of college textbooks continues to rise, a St. Paul-based Internet company is offering a novel solution: Get a free, downloadable textbook, but one that also contains advertising for fast-food restaurants and photocopying services.
Freeload Press is offering about 20 college accounting or finance textbooks, study guides and worksheets which can be downloaded from its website, freeloadpress.com, as free Adobe PDF files. Freeload says at least some of the titles are either required or recommended at 47 colleges nationwide, including Minnesota State University in Mankato.
The advertisements are embedded in the text at what the company says are natural breaks, such as between the end of a chapter and the chapter's study questions. Advertisements are limited to 50 ads per 600-page textbook.
Students must register to download the books, but don't need to give any personally identifiable information to do so, he said.
"No higher education publisher had ever put advertisements in books before," said Tom Doran, Freeload Press CEO. "But we thought the time was right" now that many college students have broadband connections to download books quickly, and are well-acquainted with online services.
Advertisers include Culver's fast-food restaurants, FedEx Kinko's photocopying service, Pura Vida Coffee and Total Recall Learning study guides. Advertisers pay a flat fee or one based on the number of downloads.
Doran declined to disclose the fees charged to advertisers or the number of books that have been downloaded by students since the company, founded in 2004, began offering the service last fall.
Textbook publishers are embracing the advertising-supported concept because the high cost of printing physical textbooks has resulted in students buying fewer of them, Doran said. Students have instead turned to sharing textbooks, buying used ones or using the Internet to seek out low-cost foreign editions.
"We own the textbooks we offer now," Doran said. "Step two will be to start licensing other publishers' books. All the major textbook publishers have contacted us."
Doran acknowledged that some people might be offended by advertising appearing in textbooks, but added, "I think it's not that big an issue."
Craig Swan, University of Minnesota vice provost for undergraduate education, said the Freeload service "is certainly worth a look" at a time when the university has a student-faculty committee to study the problem of costly textbooks.
"A lot will depend on the quality of the textbooks they offer," Swan said. "But if they can deliver quality texts, it will be an interesting way of addressing the problem of textbook costs."
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