Our Story

A New Approach to College Textbooks. Finally.

We are a college textbook publishing company with a mission to use technology and innovative business models to lower costs, increase access and personalize learning worldwide.

We work with successful textbook authors and well-known scholars to create great textbooks. Our open textbook model gives faculty complete control over our content. Students have a choice of low-cost print and digital formats, including a free online reader.

Flat World Knowledge Is ...

expand all | collapse all
Where we come from:

Our founders, Jeff Shelstad and Eric Frank, spent a combined 30+ years working for some of the largest traditional textbook publishers, including Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, and Cengage. In 2007, they set out to create a different kind of publishing company that would dramatically reduce textbook prices for students, and make it easy for faculty to personalize their textbooks to improve learning and teaching.

Today, we are a fast-growing textbook publishing company, backed by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann AG, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Random House, Inc., to name a few. We’re proudly turning textbook publishing upside down and right side up – freeing the textbook in more ways than one.

How we’re similar to the textbook publishers you know:

We sign experienced scholars and authors to write great textbooks. With an unwavering focus on quality, we use a modern product development process that includes extensive peer reviewing and all the supplements you need to successfully teach your course.

How we’re better than the textbook publishers you know:

We publish high quality textbooks in multiple formats at much lower prices than traditional publishers with expensive legacy systems to protect.

Our authors revise our textbooks to keep them current, but professors can move to new editions (we call them versions) only if and when you want to.

Flat World is also different in our approach to sharing knowledge. We think restrictions on how knowledge can be used and shared isn’t good for education. If there’s no sharing, there’s no education.

That’s why Flat World textbooks are published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA), a forward-thinking approach to copyright used by popular sites such as Google and Flickr.

By publishing our textbooks under an open license, instructors are free to take our content and do much more with it than they can do with traditional textbooks. They can reuse, revise, remix and redistribute it. They can create their own version of their textbook to match their syllabus. And they can feel good knowing all their students have free, unlimited access to their textbook online.

Students can read Flat World textbooks online for FREE. It’s true.

Higher education costs continue to rise. Open textbooks are an easy way to drive down costs and reach under-served students. Every Flat World textbook is free to read online . Now you can be certain that all of your students have access to the textbook that you assign.

Students can also access their textbook and interactive study aids in a range of low-cost formats, all available at a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook. Formats include print, e-books for the iPad, Kindle, Nook and other e-readers, audiobooks, and print-it-yourself PDFs. Our content is free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions and never expires.