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.