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. In order 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. 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, have started what they call the Global Text Project. This semester the project's first book, "Information Systems," is being used at Addis Ababa University and at Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University in Indonesia. The endeavor relies on professors and experienced professionals worldwide to each write, pro bono, at least one chapter of a book. Each chapter is reviewed by a scholar. Editors then assemble the chapters into complete books. The books are written using wikis, communal Web sites that encourage people to frequently edit and update the material.