An Author's Perspective on Open: Choice & Flexibility

As a Flat World Knowledge (FWK) author I’d like to let you know why I love “open.” To me, open means choice and flexibility. My FWK Principles of Management book let’s faculty pick and choose the chapters they want to include for their students, and then those very students can pick and choose the format they want to learn with – online (for free), or in other forms like paper or portable e-forms. You can even annotate the chapters online. And the process quick and easy! Quick and easy for faculty and students alike. As FWK says on their site: “It’s this easy: search our catalog, request a print review copy or review our book online, complete an online adoption form, give a URL to your students, and download our supplements. Done. It really is that easy.”

Sure, this is great for faculty and students, but FWK has also really opened my eyes in terms of the benefits to authors (beyond royalties, though don’t get me wrong, I’ll still take those checks!). With my first FWK book we were able to beta test our material with great faculty using the FWK online publishing engine. In traditional publishing this type of beta process is common, particular with the better publishers, but you are still typically working with some form of paper product, and the final book is always a function of having all the chapters completed. With FWK, we were able to incorporate suggested changes, and even new chapters, within the beta process itself. As a result, adopting faculty have access to your material much faster than the traditional write-edit-publish process allows. Moreover, if new material becomes available to me as an author I can make it just as quickly available to my adopting faculty. In many ways the FWK approach marries the best of leading edge information technologies and knowledge management with print-on-demand capabilities. For an authors and adopting faculty (and their students), this is great stuff.

Yes, to me, FWK is all about choice and flexibility. One of the business adages that seems like it captures the FWK future is: “if your customers get to the future before you do, they won’t be your customers anymore!” As someone who writes textbooks for some other great publishers it seems like FWK has gotten to this part of the future already – by that I mean that this future is today! FWK is right in the middle of a perfect storm where students and faculty want choice and immediate access to information, authors want all the benefits of the digital age, great learning material is available in a malleable electronic form, and technology allows immediate access, be it online, audible, digital, or print on demand. I’m guessing (and hoping) that my other publishers will get this formula right eventually, but in the meantime I am very happy to be a partner with the one publisher (FWK) that has gotten this right today.