Tom Doran, the CEO and founder of Freeload Press, a small Minnesota startup looking to challenge the way the book industry sells textbooks, wants to help college students when it comes to paying for their course texts. By generating revenue from the advertising that will be featured on the Web site and in its textbooks, Freeload is able to offer the books for free download on its Web site or as lower-priced texts with advertising. The company plans to offer 100 free titles this fall.
Book Business EXTRA! -- What, in your opinion, has led us to where we’re at now where so much attention is being placed on the price of college textbooks and alternative avenues of obtaining text material?
Tom Doran -- Increase in tuition. Increase in student fees. Increase in textbook prices... Decrease in student aid.
EXTRA! -- As students gear up for the fall semester, how many textbooks that were downloaded from Freeload Press are we going to be seeing in the lecture halls and classrooms out there?
Doran -- We don’t know. We’ve had over a million hits to the Web site in last few weeks. Many students are downloading textbooks independent of instructor assignments. Our Spring ‘06 list of books that was available for instructor consideration for Fall ‘06 use, will be used in over 125 courses. And that was our beta list--which featured only four textbooks and eight study aids. After Labor Day there will be over 100 e-textbooks and e-study aids available for free downloads. Once those books have been considered for course adoption by instructors, we expect a quarter million downloads--which is only one percent of the course markets we are in.
EXTRA! -- You’ve received quite a lot of national press recently. What response from students, potential advertisers, etc. have you received from the exposure on TV and print?
Doran -- Not surprisingly, students love the idea. They want to see more books at the site. We’re adding more titles as quickly as we can. As for advertisers, by design, we just started our campaign for advertising. We wanted to build circulation first. What’s nice is that advertisers are now approaching us.
EXTRA! -- What would you say is the biggest obstacle standing in the company’s way to meeting its goals of having your anticipated count of texts available by September? What’s been the most difficult type of course to obtain a title for the site?
Doran -- We already have the 100-plus books in production. So they’ll be available after Labor Day. We have three publishers participating in our fall season. We expect to add more partners, as publishers get comfortable with the model. Regarding courses, the challenges are not defined by the type of course. Our challenge is get more books into the system as quickly as we can to meet the demand. We are targeting the intro courses first. These tend to feature the most expensive textbooks. And students enrolled in these courses want to see more books at our site.
EXTRA! -- Is it possible to still adequately compensate the top textbook authors for their work through the type of advertising structure you have in place?
Doran -- The royalty percentage college textbook publishers pay authors is not radically different than other types of publishing. The challenges for the industry are in other dynamics. These include the cost of free material textbook publishers provide instructors, a highly efficient used book market that begins replacing the publisher’s business very early in the product life cycle, and a very savvy end-user. College students are finding all sorts of ways to find replacement products, or share a textbook or, increasingly take a course without buying any textbook.
As for authors, we’ve recruited some top names in the business using a royalty based-on-ad-revenue model. Our model doesn’t yield as much royalty per unit, but there are no used books, and there is much better sell-through. So it’s a volume decision for the author. Plus, there is a missionary element to our work that resonates. Authors are drawn to our model because most agree that textbook prices have reached an unreasonable (some would say unsustainable) level. Our authors want to participate in changing the industry.
Extra! -- What kind of response has this concept met with so far from the industry’s textbook publishers? How about the reaction from universities and colleges?
Doran -- This is a good place to emphasize that through our Textbook Media services we work with other publishers. We are a distributor. Sixty-five percent of the titles available this fall are from other publishers. We started with our own small imprint of Freeload Press books, because we knew we needed a proof of concept.
With that, and based on publishers requests, this fall Textbook Media is adding an exciting alternative program, called Payload Textbooks, where the end-user pays a fee for an e-textbook with ads. Publishers can afford to adjust end-user price, because they are now collecting ad revenues. We have a handful of publishers interested in testing that model. We expect they will try it first with new publications, or smaller market books, to test it out. We’re excited about working with them.
Regarding academic reaction, most college instructors love our model. It’ll be of no surprise to your readers that some don’t like the idea of commercializing a textbook. But most understand what we are attempting to do. Instructors have been concerned about textbook prices for some time. This has been especially true with the recent price-spikes in tuition. Instructors realize that the cost of a textbook can significantly increase the cost of their course.
That noted, we need to be careful about what types of advertisements are placed in the textbook, where we place those ads and how many we place. We have done a lot of homework with educators as we have developed our Textbook Media model. It includes a patent-pending advertising placement system that’s built on our two years of research and in-class testing.
The result is high levels of approval from thousands of instructor registrants, a 100-percent rollover from our instructor-users, and a dynamic where instructors have become our ambassadors on campus. We see their colleagues from the same campus but in different departments come through as adopters.
[My] favorite comment from one of the first instructor-users: “This is a great idea. Don’t screw it up.” We believe we understand both parts of that message.
Book Business Extra Q&A -- Freeload Press CEO Talks About His Mission to Offer Students Free, Downloadable Textbooks
Tom Doran, the CEO and founder of Freeload Press, a small Minnesota startup looking to challenge the way the book industry sells textbooks, wants to help college students when it comes to paying for their course texts. By generating revenue from the advertising that will be featured on the Web site and in its textbooks, Freeload is able to offer the books for free download on its Web site or as lower-priced texts with advertising. The company plans to offer 100 free titles this fall.
Book Business EXTRA! -- What, in your opinion, has led us to where we’re at now where so much attention is being placed on the price of college textbooks and alternative avenues of obtaining text material?
Tom Doran -- Increase in tuition. Increase in student fees. Increase in textbook prices... Decrease in student aid.
EXTRA! -- As students gear up for the fall semester, how many textbooks that were downloaded from Freeload Press are we going to be seeing in the lecture halls and classrooms out there?
Doran -- We don’t know. We’ve had over a million hits to the Web site in last few weeks. Many students are downloading textbooks independent of instructor assignments. Our Spring ‘06 list of books that was available for instructor consideration for Fall ‘06 use, will be used in over 125 courses. And that was our beta list--which featured only four textbooks and eight study aids. After Labor Day there will be over 100 e-textbooks and e-study aids available for free downloads. Once those books have been considered for course adoption by instructors, we expect a quarter million downloads--which is only one percent of the course markets we are in.
EXTRA! -- You’ve received quite a lot of national press recently. What response from students, potential advertisers, etc. have you received from the exposure on TV and print?
Doran -- Not surprisingly, students love the idea. They want to see more books at the site. We’re adding more titles as quickly as we can. As for advertisers, by design, we just started our campaign for advertising. We wanted to build circulation first. What’s nice is that advertisers are now approaching us.
EXTRA! -- What would you say is the biggest obstacle standing in the company’s way to meeting its goals of having your anticipated count of texts available by September? What’s been the most difficult type of course to obtain a title for the site?
Doran -- We already have the 100-plus books in production. So they’ll be available after Labor Day. We have three publishers participating in our fall season. We expect to add more partners, as publishers get comfortable with the model. Regarding courses, the challenges are not defined by the type of course. Our challenge is get more books into the system as quickly as we can to meet the demand. We are targeting the intro courses first. These tend to feature the most expensive textbooks. And students enrolled in these courses want to see more books at our site.
EXTRA! -- Is it possible to still adequately compensate the top textbook authors for their work through the type of advertising structure you have in place?
Doran -- The royalty percentage college textbook publishers pay authors is not radically different than other types of publishing. The challenges for the industry are in other dynamics. These include the cost of free material textbook publishers provide instructors, a highly efficient used book market that begins replacing the publisher’s business very early in the product life cycle, and a very savvy end-user. College students are finding all sorts of ways to find replacement products, or share a textbook or, increasingly take a course without buying any textbook.
As for authors, we’ve recruited some top names in the business using a royalty based-on-ad-revenue model. Our model doesn’t yield as much royalty per unit, but there are no used books, and there is much better sell-through. So it’s a volume decision for the author. Plus, there is a missionary element to our work that resonates. Authors are drawn to our model because most agree that textbook prices have reached an unreasonable (some would say unsustainable) level. Our authors want to participate in changing the industry.
Extra! -- What kind of response has this concept met with so far from the industry’s textbook publishers? How about the reaction from universities and colleges?
Doran -- This is a good place to emphasize that through our Textbook Media services we work with other publishers. We are a distributor. Sixty-five percent of the titles available this fall are from other publishers. We started with our own small imprint of Freeload Press books, because we knew we needed a proof of concept.
With that, and based on publishers requests, this fall Textbook Media is adding an exciting alternative program, called Payload Textbooks, where the end-user pays a fee for an e-textbook with ads. Publishers can afford to adjust end-user price, because they are now collecting ad revenues. We have a handful of publishers interested in testing that model. We expect they will try it first with new publications, or smaller market books, to test it out. We’re excited about working with them.
Regarding academic reaction, most college instructors love our model. It’ll be of no surprise to your readers that some don’t like the idea of commercializing a textbook. But most understand what we are attempting to do. Instructors have been concerned about textbook prices for some time. This has been especially true with the recent price-spikes in tuition. Instructors realize that the cost of a textbook can significantly increase the cost of their course.
That noted, we need to be careful about what types of advertisements are placed in the textbook, where we place those ads and how many we place. We have done a lot of homework with educators as we have developed our Textbook Media model. It includes a patent-pending advertising placement system that’s built on our two years of research and in-class testing.
The result is high levels of approval from thousands of instructor registrants, a 100-percent rollover from our instructor-users, and a dynamic where instructors have become our ambassadors on campus. We see their colleagues from the same campus but in different departments come through as adopters.
[My] favorite comment from one of the first instructor-users: “This is a great idea. Don’t screw it up.” We believe we understand both parts of that message.