The Future of the Textbook: A Quick Glimpse

Ama­zon ran a not so suc­cess­ful etext­book exper­i­ment at Prince­ton this year. Now it’s time for the iPad to take a crack at the dig­i­tal text­book mar­ket. Wast­ing lit­tle time, Cours­eS­mart has announced an iPad app that will bring thou­sands of text­books to Apple’s new plat­form. The video above gives you a glimpse into this ini­tia­tive. And while you can only tell so much from a short video, it looks like this prod­uct could have some legs. The inter­face looks pret­ty slick, and the prod­uct quite usable. The down­side is that Cours­eS­mart does­n’t do enough to low­er costs for stu­dents. Gen­er­al­ly, the com­pa­ny rents dig­i­tal text­books for 50% of the price that Ama­zon sells hard copies. That leaves stu­dents still pay­ing inflat­ed prices. And so the video above hard­ly con­sti­tutes an endorse­ment. It’s more to show you where the mar­ket is going.

See our young and grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Text­books.

via Wired

Already, you can down­load a free app pro­duced by Cours­es­mart