The Digital Reader

Like many other people I have a less than perfectly reliable internet connection, and that has taught me that having an offline copy is only prudent. So when I read about the problems that the Fairfax Public Schools and now CourseSmart have encountered with online textbooks, I can’t help but wonder why no one saw it coming.

CourseSmart is widely recognized as the leader of the digital textbook market. This start-up was founded by major textbook publishers in 2007 and is now used by hundreds of schools. Or at least it was used by hundreds of schools – right up until the servers crashed earlier this week.
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This weeks distraction from real news comes to us from the New York Times. This august publication discovered earlier this week that CourseSmart’s new analytics tools were enabling instructors to spy on students’ study habits:

I have long argued that textbook rentals aren’t as good of a value for college students as textbook arbitrage (buying and selling back textbooks), but it looks like I might have to eat my words.

The University of Wisconsin Stout is one of a couple dozen American universities that directly rents paper textbooks to student, and this past Fall semester they started dabbling in renting digital textbooks. The pilot program is going to be expanded this Spring, and the early results from the Fall semester have already revealed some interesting info on cost and user adoption.
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There’s a big digital publishing conference kicking off this week called O’Reilly Tools of Change. I’m not going myself (no press pass), but I have been getting early copies of the press release announcements.
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Inkling is going to tell us tomorrow that creating an enhanced textbook is hard work and requires Inkling Habitat or some other equally capable platform. One of Inkling’s competitors disagrees.

Kno, a Santa Clara Calif. based startup that originally got into digital textbooks during the eReader Bubble, has just announced Kno Advance. This new digital publishing platform is designed to make it easy for a textbook publisher to create and publish a new enhanced digital textbook from nothing more than a PDF of the print edition, and then update the digital textbook on the fly.
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There’s an old rule of business which says that you have to go where the customers are, and now it looks like the rule applies to free content as well as paid. The 20 Million Minds Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to lowering the cost of education by providing students with high quality and low cost textbooks, has just announced that their textbooks will soon be available through Chegg.

The Foundation has been creating open-source textbooks for some years now, but unfortunately they haven’t gotten very many schools to adopt their textbooks, and most post-secondary schools in the US reportedly are not even aware of the the 20MMF.
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McGraw-Hill is at CES this year to show off their latest digital textbook platform (they actually have several).

Smartbook is described as an adaptive system that adjusts the reading experience to each student’s pace and mastery level. It builds on the content that McGraw-Hill has developed for past textbook titles and expands upon it to offer students a customized learning experience.
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