Image via CrunchBase
The old days of going to the bookstore at the beginning of a semester and buying 20 pounds of expensive textbooks and supplements is fast disappearing. And with it is a complex and expensive supply chain.
Although numerous textbook rental startups have emerged over the last five years, no major players have entered the market. Until now.
Amazon has announced the launch of a new textbook rental service. Called Amazon Textbook Rental, the service enables college students to rent textbooks at up to 70% savings, according to the company.
By signing up for Amazon Student, users can also receive six months of free two day shipping, plus offers to receive four years of Amazon Prime at 50% off.
Even more innovative players are also appearing. According to Xconomy, Boundless Learning, a Boston based company,which started in early 2011, has redesigned its free, open educational content platform for college students, in its public launch just ahead of the new school year. Beset by lawsuits from the major publishers, which accuse them of stealing their content, Boundless is challenging the traditional model of professors choosing a textbook and forcing students to use them.
What’s also interesting about Boundless is its progress in the rapidly moving field of ed-tech. Its new site looks cleaner and easier to read and navigate (see left), at least to this reporter’s eye. Boundless now also offers materials for introductory courses in history, sociology, physiology, and writing—beyond its original subjects of biology, psychology, and economics.
Students can go to the site, type in their assigned course textbook, and if there’s a match, Boundless will present alternative course materials. The text and images come from open educational resources, U.S. government sites (such as NIH and NSF), and independent sites that use Creative Commons licenses (like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia of Earth).
“We don’t create content, we curate,” saya Boundless co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz.
Also new on the site are design features intended to make it easier to do things like see where you are among various units of content (via a sidebar); jump to pieces of content you are looking for (via search and a table of contents); and keep tabs on your progress and note-taking (via a Facebook-like activity feed). Boundless is also working on social features to take advantage of the peer-to-peer learning aspect of the community it is trying to build.
All of this points to a future beyond traditional textbooks—though the transition will probably take years. “Our view is much more modular, much more sharable,” says Diaz. Physical textbooks are constrained by their weight and linear design, he says, and the first wave of e-textbooks are just digital representations of the same thing. But by using open Web materials, he says, “you can go as deep as you want, go as broad as you want, and we can surface the right information at the right time.”
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