Challenging Amazon.com’s textbook-optimized Kindle DX, CourseSmart has just launched a free digital textbook application for the iPhone.
In building a library of 7,000 digital textbooks, the company partnered with major publishers, including Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and the Bedford, Freeman, and Worth Publishing Group. The new application will include the book’s complete text along with diagrams, illustrations and charts. In addition, students can perform topic searches throughout their digital textbook library.
CourseSmart executive VP Frank Lymanm had this statement: “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 … 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.”