With the average college student paying more than $900 for textbooks each semester, one Minnesota-based company hopes to alleviate some of the financial strain for students.
Freeloadpress.com offers a catalogue of textbook titles completely free to students with the stipulation that the textbooks contain advertisements. The company’s mission statement is to liberate the textbook in order to provide these once-expensive items to any college student from any financial background, the company Web site said.
“We’ve literally been to bookstores where we’ve seen kids break into tears when they see the prices,” Freeload Press CEO Tom Doran said in an interview with ABC News.
The company will provide more than 100 titles this fall. Students must fill out an online survey, then they can download the textbook PDF and print it. The ads in each textbook will not be distracting. They will come at sensible breaks in the material, Doran told The Associated Press.
“We place the advertising very subtly into the textbooks,” Doran said.
Vice president for student affairs Bill Kibler said the main question in his mind is which textbooks are available. That would be a major concern for students because if their classes’ textbooks were not available, then they would still need to buy them,
“Our bookstore has a very effective method of surveying every professor and every department,” Kibler said. “They get their information directly from our faculty.”
Off-campus bookstores also get this same information. The campus bookstore makes sure that there are enough textbooks available for as many students as possible, Kibler added.
More than half of college students are not even buying all the textbooks for all their classes, mainly due to the cost of these books, and many students are leaving college with more than $21,000 in debt, the Web site said.
Students must register with the Web site and then fill out the survey. The survey consists of a few brief questions on a student’s financial background, what major purchase do they plan on making after they finish college and how long a student plans on staying in college.
After a student completes registers and completes the survey, that person is directed to a page where they can browse through the textbook titles available. With the click of a button, students can download the PDF file of a textbook or they can purchase a paperback copy; which, according to the Web site, will cost anywhere from $19 to $39 with a $5 shipping and handling fee.
Freeload Press formed in 2004 with the goal of using sponsorship to provide free course materials. To date, more than 100 colleges are using Freeload Press course materials, and the company set a goal last spring to provide more than one million textbooks for free, the Web site said.