Get Textbooks on Your iPod

Image by Niels van Eck via Flickr

If you get your textbooks from CourseSmart, you can now access them on your iPhone or iPod.  U. S. News & World Report shares the details:

CourseSmart, a California company that has already made more than 7,000 digitized textbooks from 12 publishers available to its subscribers through their computers, recently added E-textbooks for the iPhone to its offerings. Users can download the application that allows them to read the new iPod-friendly texts for free through Apple’s App Store, but users are required to pay for the textbooks themselves at a fee that is about 60 to 75 percent of a traditional book’s cost.

PC World writer Todd Weiss points out that there are some drawbacks to this new offering:

First, we’re talking about reading a large textbook on a small iPhone or iPod Touch screen. It may be neat to imagine, but it may not be so easy to use, especially when you are looking for information and you just can’t seem to locate it on the device’s small screen. How likely is it that students will actually want to do this and will find it as productive as reading a traditional paper book? And what happens when your Internet connection is down and you can’t access your books? Believe me, this will happen sometimes. (Continue)