Apple Thoughts: Textbooks on Your iPhone/iPod Touch

"Amazon.com Inc. now has a Kindle competitor for textbooks: a California company called CourseSmart."

Amazon.com has been trying to sell it's Kindle DX to students and faculty as an alternative to the textbook. Now CourseSmart is entering the market with it's own textbook reader on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Amazon.com has lined up all the major textbook publishers to provide content, but now some of those same publishers are involved in this offering from CourseSmart. CourseSmart has over 7,000 titles from 12 publishers, and students will "rent" the textbooks for a set amount of access time, usually 180 days. The Kindle versions are purchased outright. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but anything to foster competition and drive down prices is a plus, especially in the notoriously overpriced world of textbooks.