Amedeo Challenge: Free Internet Medical Textbooks

This is a great idea: Amedeo Challenge is a non-profit organization that offers “bounties” (currently there is one available for
12,500) to physicians to write high-quality medical textbooks, which are then to be distributed on the Internet for free and sold in published editions for extremely affordable prices. Their aim is to promote affordable medical education to both the general populace at large and physicians, illustrating their concept thusly:

If medical textbooks of an average price of 50
per copy are downloaded an average 100,000 times a year, savings will be around 5,000,000
per title and per year. The resulting prospective is vertiginous: producing and freely distributing 100 medical textbooks could save doctors and interested lay people 500,000,000
per year – half a billion euros!

Which is a nice little bit of wishful thinking math-jiggery, but we still like the concept. Already available on their site is an HIV textbook and an Influenza textbook is forthcoming.

Obviously, this project has interesting possibilities for doctors in the developing world, and we wish it the best. Amedeo is currently taking larger sponsorships and will soon be opening their site to smaller, Pay-Pal-able donations.

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