iPhone's Newest App - Read and Study Your College Course Textbooks on Your iPhone

We are all familiar with the iPhone slogan, "we have an app for that." In their attempt to make life easier, they search for novel ways to add user friendly applications to the iPhone to increase the user's productivity. Well, they have created an app to make college students ability to study whenever easier. Now there is an iPhone app for accessing college course text books. CourseSmart, a distributor of e-textbooks, or textbooks converted into a format that can be viewed on a computer and iPhone, has combined ingenuity and created an app to enable students to access CourseSmart's 7,000 volume plus library of college text books, in etextbook format, via their iPhone.

There is no cost for the CourseSmart iPhone App, however, registration is required. Existing clients only need to sign in to there existing account to gain instant access to there previous etextbook purchases to download the iPhone App and begin using this newfangled study application. Reviewing my daughters CourseSmart iPhone app etextbooks was not that much of a problem, even for my old weak eyes. Coursesmart appears to have prepared well and did a good job putting this all together. It looks to be a rather well focused first effort - there are some minor bugs that need to be worked out, most noticeable to me is zooming in is not possible, but fortunately, the display text is rather clear, and the search function works as well as any I have used before.

You can not take notes with the CourseSmart iPhone App itself, but I don't believe there will be too much of a demand for that anyway, pen and paper still works well, plus there is an iPhone recorder app so the student could always record their notes and play them back. But one thing for sure, if I had the option of carrying my iPhone and a composition tablet versus carrying a composition tablet and a full size college course text book, I would opt for the first. Until it becomes more popular and you see more and more people doing in, reading long form text on your iPhone may feel a bit weird... but I am sure you'll get use to it. It is the way written communication is headed.

I find that I read less and less paper hard copies all the time. My daughter never goes anywhere without her iPhone attached somewhere on her person. She opted to get all of her college text books in etextbook format which I am really happy about because I reduced this years textbook expenditures by at least 50% over last year. For some reason etextbooks are less expensive than the hard copy counter parts. To access CourseSmart etextbooks, constant internet connectivity is necessary, but with all of the wi-fi access spot all over campus and in town that does not present any problems.

CourseSmart is a joint venture of five major college text publishers, including McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Education, and Cencage Learning. There new offering of free iPhone and iTouch apps to access college course etextbooks is available to its subscribers only. Amazon.com, will be testing a similar application on their Kindle DX this fall. Student course text books in etextbook format have the potential to develop into a huge business. I believe it will become quite popular with the students, I know my daughter like it. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the succeeding years as the mobile content devices mature and etextbooks becomes more ever-present. I wonder if this means she will get better grades this year?

Resource: Personal Experience