Apple Takes a Shine to E-Textbooks

We blogged last week about Amazon's cautious dip into the world of college textbooks, a pilot program wherein some students in a few classes at a handful of colleges and universities will be given a slick, new Kindle DX e-book reader to download textbooks, classroom handouts and other educational material otherwise printed on tree fillets.

It's probably just good timing for Apple, since its iPhone application developers are mostly third-party players, but now there's an app for that, as reported in Monday's Wall Street Journal. A company that already provides an online, subscription-based textbook service — CourseSmart — is making a corresponding iPhone (and iPod Touch) application free to existing subscribers.

The company's college textbook catalog boasts more than 7,000, at least for the iPhone app, from such publishers as McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson Education. Instead of buying the book outright for way more than it's actually worth (often costing several trips to the plasma donation center), subscribers pay for 180 days of access.

But who wants to pull an all-night study session glued to such a tiny screen? Good question, particularly amid well-supported rumors of an Apple tablet that would undoubtedly sport a screen that's much easier on the eyes. Another piece of the puzzle: CourseSmart's e-textbooks are not available on Amazon's Kindle, which would be a bad deal for the company if they didn't anticipate the release of a more formidable contender to the Kindle.

I'll bet backpack makers are nervously biting their nails, trying to come up with a retro marketing blitz recalling the good ol' days of heavy loads and slipped discs.

Photo courtesy of CourseSmart LLC