ANSWER: Bring it on.

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This is a great idea, and long overdue:

Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won’t pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx (FDX), Kinko’s and Pura Vida coffee.

Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn’t spread to college textbooks — partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year.

Now, a small Minnesota startup is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6 billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. Students, or anyone else who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF file of the book, which they can store on their hard drive and print.

The model faces big obstacles. Freeload doesn’t yet have a stable of well-known textbook authors across a range of subjects, and it lacks the editorial and marketing muscle of the “Big 3″ textbook publishers (Thomson, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill). Its textbooks don’t come with bells and whistles such as online study guides that bigger publishers have spent millions developing in order to lure professors — who assign textbooks and are the industry’s real customers.

St. Paul-based Freeload’s numbers are modest so far: 25,000 users have registered and 50,000 books have been downloaded, for courses at schools ranging from community colleges to the University of Michigan. But the company says it is rapidly adding titles and will have 250,000 textbooks and study aids in circulation by next year. It has also signed agreements with three small, specialty publishers to make their textbooks available the same way, and is in negotiations with others.

What Freeload has going for it is its arrival on the scene at a time when textbook publishers are under immense pressure to moderate prices. A recent government study found prices have risen at twice the rate of inflation since 1986.

….. A 2005 study by the National Association of College Stores Foundation found 65 percent of students don’t buy all the required course materials — which means many probably aren’t learning the material, either.

….. A Canadian subsidiary of McGraw-Hill briefly rolled out an ad-based model, but dropped the plan last year. Susan Badger, CEO of Thomson Higher Education, said her company tested the idea with focus groups, in biology, but the professors were adamantly opposed.

Somebody needs to explain to me why the professors should care. Is it anticapitalist bias, fear that they can’t say something because of an advertiser, or what? Anyway, why aren’t all these books downloadable as PDFs yet? An ad-based model could work there too.

The fundamental reason why textbook and other college costs have been able to rise so much is the heavy federal subsidies associated with college: grants, low-interest loans, etc. The heavy subsidies have reduced price resistance and not forced onto academia the market discipline other industries have had to deal with. The ad-based textbook problem doesn’t address that, but at least it’s on narrowly-based patch.

To get any meaning or context out of this Al-AP tripe on Iraq, you need to read GP’s analysis of what is and isn’t being reported. Amazing — both Al-AP’s left-out info and GP’s post.

ANSWER: Probably not, but it will be a close call, even given what’s at stake.
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The Wall Street Journal’s subscription-only side had an editorial about this last Wednesday:

Well, that didn’t take long. Just as Mayor Richard Daley and these columns predicted, the law recently passed by Chicago’s City Council requiring a super-minimum wage is driving big retailers out of the city.

Target was the first big chain to react, recently cancelling plans to open a new superstore in a run-down area on the city’s North side. Only a few months ago the project was hailed by city leaders as an anchor for redeveloping that depressed neighborhood. Now it gets to stay depressed. Wal-Mart has also announced that its plans to build 20 new stores in the city over the next five years are “on hold” until the wage issue is resolved.

….. The Council was warned that stores would flee to the suburbs or not be built. But instead it heeded such activists as Annette Bernhardt, chief economist at New York University Law School, who claimed that “We’re very confident that retailers want and need to be in Chicago.” Whoops.

….. Mayor Daley seems intent on vetoing the bill, which he says would result in higher property taxes to compensate for lost sales-tax revenue once stores leave.

….. The entire “living-wage” movement is the latest product of upper-income politicians who want to stick it to non-union companies in the name of helping the poor. But the working poor lose twice in Chicago: first, in lost retail jobs and then in less access to low-cost goods. Alderman Carrie Austin, who represents the area where the Target store was supposed to locate, puts it this way: “My colleagues are saying, ‘Don’t worry they [the big box retailers] will come.’ Well, mine just left.”

It’s amazing how little notice that possibility that Wal-Mart might actually open TWENTY stores (and probably won’t open any more than the one that’s nearly done if the veto isn’t sustained). It looks like Chicago will resist the “living wage” urge to commit municipal suicide. But never underestimate the ability of Windy City politicians to wreck things.

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UPDATE: Taranto at Best of the Web — “A campaign against Wal-Mart is a snob’s idea of populism.”

Kirsten Vinyeta wanted to live longer, live, well, and be able to someday give life. Now she can:

Pig valve gives woman second chance at life
Without replacement, Vinyeta was headed toward heart failure
August 13, 2006

Kirsten Vinyeta won’t eat pork anymore because she’s living with a pig valve.

“I tell my friends that’s cannibalism now,” she said with a laugh. “I’m honored to have a pig part.”

That’s because that pig part saved her life, and gives her the chance to bring forth life.

The 22-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison student was diagnosed with a heart problem when she was 3 months old. Vinyeta said the doctors thought it was a heart murmur, but by the time she graduated from De Pere High School, what was thought to be a murmur was something worse.

Vinyeta had a hole in the wall where her left and right ventricle met, a dysfunctional aortic artery and valve, and had an aneurysm, said Dr. John Seccombe, a cardiothoracic surgeon with Prevea Health.

“It’s very uncommon,” Seccombe said. Seccombe, who performed the surgery, said Vinyeta’s valve would not open or shut correctly, causing blood to spill into her lungs.

“It was kind of like a door stuck open,” he said. Her heart “was going to wear out. It was just a matter of time.”

It all happened gradually. The active teen had a hard time playing soccer in high school, which eventually led to her having a hard time breathing at night while a student at the University of Minnesota. It even got to the point where she would walk through buildings to avoid walking hills.

….. Vinyeta was heading for heart failure. The then 19-year-old had a heart three times the size of her fist, because it had to work hard to pump blood throughout her body.

“It was kind of nightmarish,” she said. “I was pretty busy. Then I had to drop out (of school).”

Vinyeta said she was in denial, but had to come to grips with it facing a tough decision — to have kids in the future or not to be able to.

“It narrowed down to have a biological valve first,” she said, with a hope to have two kids one day.

With a mechanical valve, Vinyeta would have to take a blood thinner used to prevent blood clots.

However a blood thinner would put her at risk of major blood loss or a chance to lose a baby, Seccombe said.

So in February 2002, she underwent surgery. Seccombe placed a pig’s aortic artery and valve in Vinyeta.

Although doctors told her the valve would only last seven to 10 years, “I still think it was well worth it,” Vinyeta said.