Students can now read their textbooks on iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: CourseSmart,U.S. digital course materials supplier, announced on Tuesday that it is making all 7,066 of its college "e-Textbooks" available for download on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices via a free application.

By using this application, which is available on Apple's online App Store, students in the US and Canada can buy their textbooks in electronic form. They can also use iPhone or iPod Touch to quickly reference their e-textbooks in the classroom, the company said, according to media reports.

The cost of downloading electronic books to an iPhone is as same as that of downloading the same to a laptop or a netbook. And it is about 50 percent less than what one has to pay for traditional paper books at the college bookstore, the company claims. It's also a rental to be 'returned' when the course in question no longer requires it.

CourseSmart's move follows Amazon's announcement that publisher McGraw-Hill Education will make 100 college textbooks available for use on Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX e-book readers, where CourseSmart's titles are not yet available.

CourseSmart ( www.coursesmart.com) is a joint venture of five major college text publishers, including McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Education and Cencage Learning. The company said that student customers were in the "hundreds of thousands," from nearly 6,000 U.S. colleges and institutions.

"There's a lot of potential for education on the iPhone. You can search the text anywhere, at any time, which students seem to demand, given their mobile lifestyles," Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, was quoted as saying by several media reports.

Founded in 2007, CourseSmart now has college students from nearly 6,000 campuses in the US and Canada using its electronic textbooks.