CourseSmart: College eBook Leader
August 31, 2011
We monitor the eBook market. The search functions for eBooks are an area ripe for innovation. As we were looking for more effective search solutions for eBooks, we came across an item which we wanted to document.
An example of the way that technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives is the increased use of digital textbooks by college students. Due to high costs of college tuition, many students are finding eBooks to be more affordable and they offer direct access to media resources like online quizzes and extra course material not taught in lectures.
In order to capitalize on this new market, electronic textbook companies like CourseSmart, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon are all fighting for the claim of largest eBook library. Unfortunately, there was no way to objectively compare each company’s offerings–until now.
According to the study What Electronic Textbook Provider Has The Biggest Library? the textbook price comparison site Campusbooks recently did a study to find a winner. The study states:
The site worked with partner booksellers to come up with a list of the 1,000 most popular textbooks for fall 2011 to use as its metric. It takes into account data that professors share with bookstores in order to help them determine demand, including which books they have selected for their upcoming classes and how many students are signed up for them.
After reviewing their data, Campusbooks declared CourseSmart to be the leader in eBooks.
Jasmine Ashton, August 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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One Response to “CourseSmart: College eBook Leader”
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CourseSmart is not a scam. As long as you are satisfied with reading on screen, and ONLY on screen, I guess they are just fine.
However, if you want to, or have to, print a page or two, you are in trouble. Yes you can print (up to 10 pages at a time, and 150% of the pages in the book total), but the pages come out at smaller than a quarter piece of paper. We tried this from various Browsers, and different operating systems. Always the same result.
After contacting Coursesmart, they graciously reset the page counter to 0, but other than that they referred to a non-existing software download link, and declared the issue as solved.
In the middle of the course, our daughter ended up buying the printed book. She is hoping for a refund. Let’s see how that works out.
I would not recommend, or use their service.