First Monday just published an article that David Wiley and I wrote. We are currently working on an expanded version of this article now that we have access to an additional year’s worth of data. Flat World is certainly an interesting company! Here’s the abstract:

“Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model.”

You can find the full article here.