The time has come for textbooks to be their best: textbooks with students at the center of our product. We’re excited for the opportunity to fix the textbook publishing industry together. We know, that with a bit of spice and love, textbooks can be made better for you. Unlike most publishers, we’ve listen to your feedback. And now we’re finally here.
Let’s breakdown the problems piece by piece:
‍One, textbook prices which have grown more than 1,000% since 1977. That’s three times the rate of inflation.
‍Two, textbook quality has remained stagnant with around 70% of students finding their textbooks useless or not very useful.
Three, an adjacent pain point to high cost and low quality of textbooks, students go through a tedious, aimless, and often wasteful search for alternative educational material to fill in their knowledge gaps or satisfy their learning preference. There is also no good way to merge all of the cool stuff, like Kahn Academy, flashcards, practice, animations, and that good stuff…, all into one solution.
‍
These three problems are part of the same puzzle and need to be solved simultaneously to address the core needs of students.
Currently, everyone that was making money 20 years ago (Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Cengage who control over 80% of the market) are still making money today. Now that’s a big problem.
These three leading players have been the source of high cost and low quality, but still, the majority of courses need copyrighted content and textbooks to some degree. As a result, students are captive customers and professors are unintentionally fueling this unfair and unethical market. This is the main reason why we do what we do.