“When Bassim Hamadeh was a student at the University of
California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand the challenge of
procuring the right textbooks for his classes. ‘They were
high-priced, poor quality custom textbooks,’ Hamadeh says. So he
started planning a business that would make it easier for
professors to create and publish high-quality custom texts, and
provide those materials to students at an affordable price. Since
its launch in 1992, Hamadeh has been running UniversityReaders on
open source software.“College textbooks are big business for book publishers and
sometimes, much to the dismay of students, for professors. Often,
what students end up with is an expensive mish-mash of ‘required’
documents, study guides, and CDs that often go unused…”