ReadWriteWeb

Chegg, the largest online textbook rental company, is unveiling two new services today to help expand its reach into the university student market. Describing it as an effort to personalize its offerings, Chegg will now offer homework help as well as course scheduling information to its customers.

These new features aren't a surprise. They follow Chegg's acquisitions last year of CourseRank and Cramster. The former offers course scheduling and review information, and the latter offers homework help. The services these companies offered have now been integrated into Chegg so that its textbook rental customers can easily take advantage of them.

Sales of digital textbooks still only account for a small fraction of the U.S. college market. But according to the latest report by the social learning platform Xplana, we have reached the tipping point for e-textbooks, and the company predicts that in the next five years digital textbook sales will surpass 25% of sales for the higher education and career education markets.

That figure is a revision from the company's report last year, which predicted that one in five college textbooks would be digital by the year 2014. Due to the rate at which colleges are embracing digital textbooks, Xplana now projects that sales will grow by 80 to 100% over the next four years.

Over the past half-year, we have written extensively about e-books and e-readers. We've discussed the merits of e-books over paper books. We've covered Kindle e-books outselling hardcover best-sellers and their strength over the holiday season. We've even included the growth of e-readers and e-books in one of our Top Trends of 2010 posts.

But, as ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus discussed in "5 Ways that Paper Books are Better than E-Books," everything from price to packaging to, most importantly, the feel of physical books may keep them on the shelves for a long time to come. Now, in a study called "Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education," another round in the debate has been settled on the side of paper. 75% of student preferred old-fashioned, paper-and-board textbooks over electronic versions.

Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app - which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 - doesn't really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram's new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous.

Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13" MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. The question, though, is if programs like this aren't a bit premature, given that nobody has actually used the device yet and that we don't really know how well the iPad will work for textbooks and other school-related activities.

New office, same job. After just 10 months as president and CEO of Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero division, former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig is packing up shop and relocating to online textbook rental startup Chegg where he will hold the same title. Chegg claims to have saved students over $140 million on textbooks by offering their "Netflix style" rent by mail service.

College is a horrifying time in one's personal development. Aside from being "the best years of your life," those years are also those in which your expenditures outstrip your income by more than they ever will later (with any luck and ambition on your part, at least). They can also be some of your more strapped-for-time years and attention-deficit-overload years.

Here are a few tools we wish we'd had when we were still dorm-dwelling nobodies. Forward these links on to the collegiate folks in your life, and add your own favorites to the list. Together, we can rid the world of dropped classes and "ramen starvation."

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

We speculated about this yesterday, and by now, it looks like a given that Amazon will release a larger version of its Kindle eBook reader tomorrow that will focus on the college textbook market. While the exact hardware specs are not quite clear yet, it does seem logical that Amazon would like to push its eBook reader into this market segment. After all, according to some estimates, the textbook market is worth almost $9 billion dollars in the U.S. alone. We do wonder, however, if students will really like this idea. After all, virtually every student already owns a portable device with a nice screen for reading eTextbooks: their laptops.