College textbooks coming to the iPhone

Need a college textbook? There's an app for that

College textbooks coming to the iPhone

The seemingly endless amount of applications for Apple's iPhone has just become more useful to college students, as a brand new program from CourseSmart will allow them to peruse textbooks right from their phones.

The software will be available for free, but access to any of the 7,000 textbooks that will be offered initially will cost a small fee. The iPhone app will also allow students to view and print their textbooks from any computer.

"We've seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod Touch," said CourseSmart executive vice president Frank Lyman.

The majority come of the textbooks offered through the application are from major publishers such as including Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and the Bedford, Freeman, and Worth Publishing Group.

The benefits of not carrying around heavy books are perhaps the most obvious, but students in online learning courses could benefit as well. Many are working adults who study in their time off, so making runs to the bookstore is not always convenient. For these students, acquiring or viewing books via their phones could prove to be beneficial in terms of time management.