College textbooks are way too expensive, way too heavy, and way too tree-consuming. Electronic textbooks, on the other hand, cost less, weigh nothing, and leave forests alone.
You'd think Amazon's Kindle would be the logical place for e-textbooks to make their mobile-device debut, but CourseSmart's new eTextbooks app brings them to the iPhone and iPod Touch instead.
Specifically, eTextbooks is a companion tool for CourseSmart's textbook subscription service, which makes over 7,000 titles available for download or online viewing.
The app itself is free, but it displays only those books you've "subscribed to" (i.e., rented), and only when you have an active Internet connection. What's more, this version doesn't let you add or edit notes, but that's on the coming-soon list.
You can, however, view notes you've added via your PC. The app also supports keyword searches and lets you skim books by finger-flipping through thumbnails of each page.
Long bouts of reading might prove cumbersome, as the app doesn't reflow text to fit the screen the way, say, the Kindle app does. Each page is more or less a static image, much like a PDF. You can zoom in, scroll around, rotate into landscape mode, and so on. If only Apple offered a tablet-sized iPod Touch!
OK, college students, what do you think? Is this the best thing since bar night, or is the iPhone/Touch screen too small to make e-textbooks practical? Speak your mind in the comments!
The Kindle DX is geared, among other things, toward textbooks, a potentially huge target market.
(Credit: Amazon )Amazon announced its most recent Kindle device this week: the Kindle DX. Though it's almost identical to the original Kindle, this newer model is marketed for use with textbooks and for reading periodicals. While this seems to give the impression that Amazon has presented a more practical solution for college students, it's likely that the everyday pupil will reject this new device.
Currently, most students purchase their books on campus, where new and used copies are available, while the more frugal of us order online from Web sites like Amazon.com or eBay's Half.com. At the end of the semester, students can sell their books back to the school or to online buyback services where they receive a check for about 15 percent of the original price. For decades, this has been the routine.
More recently, however, the words "e-textbook" and "Netbook" have created a buzz around campus.
E-textbooks have been available for some time now, and are currently purchased for use on a laptop or desktop for about half the price of the print book version. Electronic textbooks are an excellent alternative to print books since with them, a student can search for a specific word or topic, copy/paste text into their coursework, comment within the textbook, and enjoy a lighter backpack.
... Read more
Every June, I am as elated as the next student to have a three-month respite from the confines of school. But, come August, you can find me on Amazon.com, frantically buying an inordinate number of books for every class--in many cases, more than two books per class.
Here's what the site's highlighting and note-taking feature looks like.
(Credit: CafeScribe)Naturally, my curiosity was stirred upon hearing about a new project from CafeScribe, launched by Salt Lake City-based Fourteen40. The program allows users to buy and download electronic textbooks online. That's nothing particularly groundbreaking, though it could save me some neck and back problems if it cut down on the pounds of books I usually have to lug around. And it could save me money too. The site says it offers books at half their retail price, and one-third the cost of used books.
But saving students' posture and money aren't CafeScribe's only goals. The site has environmental ambitions as well. The group recently conducted a study, noting that most student textbooks average 715 pages. With this in mind, the company found that the total amount of textbook pages an average student purchases amounts to a little more than one tree's worth of paper each year, and about six trees in their four years in college.
The site has some cool features for students opting to go the digital route. These include color-coded virtual highlighters, a way to organize your digital books into categories based on subject matter and a way to share your notes with friends, all of which are indicative of the site's desire to get students to go digital.
However, one qualm I have about CafeScribe is the fact that I can no longer manually annotate my books. Sometimes you just want to sit in your pajamas on Sunday night, underlining the most important lines of material and trying to make sense of them. The same cannot be done digitally; no amount of clicking my mouse can calm my frazzled mind the way my handy highlighter can.
Also, there's a fine line between getting help from fellow classmates and stealing their work. Sometimes Web sites like this blur the line more than most schools would like. CafeScribe, for instance, has a feature that allows users to see other students' notes on particular passages.
In any case, the site is currently in beta but hopes to launch officially this fall. They also plan to include a social-networking aspect, allowing students to form study groups to discuss books and compare notes. Kudos to CafeScribe for trying to save the environment and allow poor college students to be...well...less poor.
Sabena Suri, a CNET News.com summer intern, will start her senior year of high school in the fall.
- prev
- 1
- next
