CourseSmart is one of the leading etextbook companies that focuses on renting ebooks to students, with Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Macmillan as the owners. Today the company is launching its products and services in the United Kingdom.
CourseSmart’s UK division will be spearheaded by Former Random House digital director Fionnuala Duggan. She aims for the company to have over seven thousand textbooks available to students for the upcoming fall semester. In order to provide all of these books, they are seeking to establish relationships with close to 25 different publishers to provide the content. They are also making in-roads by establishing relations with some major universities to promote the digital services. Students will be able to save close to 40% by going with CourseSmart, rather then buying the tangible editions.
So how does CourseSmart function? Duggan said: “It’s like a locker based system. You rent the book and can keep it in one of our online ‘lockers’ so students don’t have to have the responsibility of storing it themselves. When the company started in 2007, there wasn’t cloud or tablets but the business has grown as the technology has developed.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
