The standard-size printed textbook provides the maximum amount of text and graphics in a single view. Once cracked open, two facing pages supply about 155 square inches of real estate, an expanse populated by hundreds of words; the occasional chart, table or photograph; and lots of restful white space. All of this is visible without clicking, zooming or swiping.
The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space. CourseSmart, a software company in San Mateo, Calif., is nonetheless trying.
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CourseSmart was founded by five major textbook publishers — Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and the Bedford, Freeman, Worth Publishing Group — and now has a catalog of more than 7,000 eTextbook titles.
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The iPhone app from CourseSmart does not reformat the print textbook’s contents for display on a small screen. Instead, it uses a PDF image of each page, as does the browser-based version of its eTextbook. All of the charts, graphs and design elements are intact, but everything — including the text — is indecipherably small without zooming in. Enlarging the text to legible size introduces the need to scroll left and right for each line, which quickly grows tedious.
“It’s not the first place to go to read your textbook,” Mr. Lyman said of the iPhone app. But he said that it could be helpful if “you’re standing outside of the classroom, the quiz is in 10 minutes, and you want to go back to that end-of-chapter summary that helped you understand the material.”
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