College students in the United States and Canada now have access to more than 7,000 eTextbooks that can be read using an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch, as the demand for electronic copies of text books is dramatically increasing.
CourseSmart opened up its 7,066 eTextbooks -- with 935 college and university classes supported over 113 different academic disciplines -- and is supported by McGraw Hill Education, Cencage Learning and Pearson Education, who are partners in the project. Interested iPhone or iPod Touch owners can download the necessary software for free directly from the Apple App Store.
It's unknown how much money CourseSmart is pulling in for the five text book publishers who support the project, but "hundreds of thousands" of students from almost 6,000 universities across the country are now customers. In addition to the five joint partners, there are at least a dozen major textbook publishers who offer their content through CourseSmart.
"We've seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod Touch," CourseSmart VP Frank Lyman said in an interview. "It's important to students to be able to access textbook content in color with the same page layout as a printed textbook and now the eTextbooks App allows them to do that."
I absolutely despised that I was forced to spend a couple hundred dollars each semester on text books I would use for a short time and sell for pennies just a few months later. Aside from lower prices, another major advantage is that the textbooks from CourseSmart can be read using an iPhone or iPod Touch, without an expensive e-book reader from Sony, Amazon, or other competing companies.
Are you willing to read an e-textbook, or do you require a physical copy directly in front of you?
