Learning is valuable, but in Africa it is more than that: It is prohibitively expensive. In Ethiopia, where the per-capita income is about $100 a year, a single textbook at Addis Ababa University can cost $50. To get more textbooks to students in developing nations, two people are leading an ambitious project to produce and freely distribute 1,000 original titles online. This article discusses the Global Text Project initiated by Richard T. Watson, interim head of the department of management information systems at the University of Georgia, and Donald J. McCubbrey, a professor of information technology and electronic commerce at the University of Denver. The project was developed after Watson told McCubbrey that he had each of his graduate students write a chapter for an XML-programming book because he could not find a textbook on the topic. About the same time, McCubbrey wrote a paper on using free online content in teaching. The endeavor is part of a larger movement to provide free academic material online. The Global Text Project intends to publish books in Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish. Already, the University of Concepcion, in Chile, has agreed to donate about 350 books, written by faculty members, for digitization in the Global Text library. Global Text differs from other wiki efforts in that scholars have editorial control of their product.