Sellers of textbooks are adopting new strategies to sell books by integrating their wares into various kinds of educational platforms. Barnes & Noble and McGraw Hill are partnering with Blackboard to integrate digital textbooks with the  an online course management system used by many colleges. CourseSmart has a similar program that is being tested at 10 universities.

Chegg, the largest textbook rental company, is the latest company to expand its services beyond books. In yesterday’s press release, Chegg.com announced that they have acquired the start-up CourseRank, a scheduling system for college students. CourseRank not only helps students schedule each semester, it also helps them plan their entire college career, rate courses, and find classes with friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting a deal on textbooks is always exciting. Just today, the textbook rental service Chegg is offering a cool deal. If you download their free iPhone App, you get a 10% discount on any book rental before August 31st with the coupon code “MOBILE”. The app helps expedite the search process, by letting you find the book you want to rent simply by scanning the book’s bar code with your phone. If you don’t have a bar code handy, you can search by ISBN, title or author’s name. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE – Winners Joy and Courtney were selected 9/1/10. This giveaway has ended.

Are you facing the financial burden of back to school and in need of cheap textbooks? Let us, along with Follett, help ease the pain with a $100 gift card.

Comment below and tell us why you need this $100 Follett gift card. “Poor college student” isn’t going to cut it, because let’s face it, most current college students, and even those of us who once walked those hallowed halls, have carried that title.

We will draw two winners September 1, 2010 – each will receive a $100 gift card from Follett to be used in their campus bookstores. Read the rest of this entry »

It sounds like something out of the future: imagine scanning a bar code of a textbook with your phone and instantly finding the cheapest price for that book available on Half.com. Well, you don’t have to imagine any longer, because a new app for the iPhone allows you to do just that.

iPhone has partnered with Half.com to create a new app that will make buying your textbooks – and many other items – much quicker and easier. The app allows users to scan the bar codes on many items, including textbooks, DVDs, and video games, with their iPhones and find the best prices on those items on Half.com. The majority of products on Half.com are 50 percent off, including pricey textbooks, which might be reason enough for me to trade in my other smart phone for an iPhone. Read the rest of this entry »

CourseSmart is making it easier for you to find and use their e-textbooks on your iPad. They’re now offering an updated version of their free “eTextbooks” app. Not only does the app make it easy to find and purchase digital textbooks, it also has a virtual bookshelf where users can see the books they own and easily access them. It also has a sticky note feature, so students can take notes as they read.

Perhaps most importantly, the eTextbooks app has new navigation within the texts.  Students can use thumbnails of pages to quickly find what they need, avoiding the pain of scrolling though pages. CourseSmart says it gives students access to over 90 percent of all textbooks in use today, with download times of no more than five minutes to both computers and hand-held devices. Storing and using digital textbooks on a iPad or similar devices overcomes the inconvenience of having the book stored on a more unwieldy computer. Read the rest of this entry »

Teachers 4 Treasures

Every year teachers reach into their own pockets to pay for school supplies, arts, crafts and other items that they need to teach their students classroom lessons. Kids can’t learn without the necessary school supplies, like pencils, paper, pens and notebooks. But with recent school layoffs and salary cutbacks, it is getting harder and harder for cash-strapped teachers to dip into their own cash reserves for school supplies.

And in Arizona, the picture is not pretty.

More than half of all K-8 students cannot afford lunch, much less basic educational tools and supplies. On average, the state’s schools budget less than five cents per student daily for supplies.

But Treasures 4 Teachers, a grassroots non-profit organization is determined to change these sobering statistics. Here’s how.

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As a college student, I truly understand why the beginning of the semester strikes fear into the hearts of many. It’s not the thought of getting up for that 8:00 a.m. class, or stressing over essays and exams. No, the worst part of the beginning of the semester is buying your books.

It is common knowledge that textbooks are expensive. Some can cost more than $200 when they are brand new. No matter how you try to spin it, the fact is that it really sucks when a grand portion of your summer paychecks go straight to paying for your Zoology 101 textbook.

So, how can you find the best, cheapest textbooks out there? You could drive to every textbook store in your town. You could make a spreadsheet and compare all of the different online rental companies. Or you could take the easy way out and use Textbook Pricing. Read the rest of this entry »

The authors of a new book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It, hope to bring attention to the problems of the American university system. Andrew Hacker is a professor emeritus at Queens College and Claudia Dreifus is a New York Times writer. They argue that too many top universities choose to focus on prestigious research, rather than high quality teaching.

“Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That’s all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford,” Hacker told The Atlantic. “We don’t really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places, and it’s the students who suffer.” The book argues that top professors spend a disproportionate amout of time working on research projects and teach few classes. “We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges. Have you ever heard of Linfield? It’s in a little town called McMinnville, Oregon. We were very impressed with the campus. The professors care. They spend time with the students. The same is true in a place called Hendrix College in Arkansas, or Earlham College in Indiana. They provide a good education because they don’t expect professors to do research.”
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Barnes and Noble has made it easier than ever for college students to access electronic textbooks. The bookstore chain is teaming up with Blackboard Inc., a provider of software to educational institutions, and the partnership hopes to launch this integration in the fall.

How will it work? Simple. When you log on to your Blackboard account and click on one of your enrolled courses, you’ll find links to electronic versions of the course’s textbooks. You’ll be able to both purchase and download these required texts all in one place.

In addition, the two companies will work to make Blackboard content coexist with Barnes and  Noble’s new eTextbook reader, called Nookstudy. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it seems that college bookstores are trying to get in on the popular new trend of textbook rental.

Follett Higher Education Group announced a new plan to expand its textbook rental program to 850 college and university bookstores. In fall 2009, Follett’s pilot program was implemented at seven schools and saved students almost $2 million, as opposed to buying textbooks. By January 2010, there were 27 schools participating in the program. Starting the 2010 school year, Follett expects to have rental programs in place at more than 800 schools.

“Our rental program is efficient and value-driven and will benefit students while providing them with yet another affordable choice from Follett bookstores,” said Thomas A. Christopher, president of Follett Higher Education Group. “We have been at the forefront of cost-savings programs for more than a century, and this is just one of many options…to drive down the cost of course materials.” Read the rest of this entry »