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.

The homework help option isn't as fully integrated into the system as the scheduling tool, but it will offer access to 24-7 help, crowdsourced Q&A, as well as a database of "answers from the back of the book" - again, based on the textbooks that students have rented.

While Chegg has expanded its offerings with the acquisition and integration of Cramster and CourseRank, it still seems largely focused on its core mission, which is textbook rentals. Nonetheless, students will probably appreciate the new tools, as students already turn to their peers for some of this data that Chegg can now provide - namely, is this a difficult class, and how much will textbooks set me back?

Furthermore, by offering homework help, Chegg will be driving students to the site not just at the start of each semester, but throughout the school year - a step in making the company a more important part of a student's world. That may become increasingly important, not just as other textbook rental companies like BookRenter challenge Chegg's dominance, but as textbooks move from print to digital.

Chegg says it plans to continue to build out these offerings and hopes to have the CourseRank feature in place at 1000 universities by the time school starts in the fall.

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.

Factors Leading to The Adoption of Digital Textbooks

One of the major reasons why Xplana's report has more optimistic figures for textbook adoption is the popularity of the iPad. Xplana's 2010 report was published before the impact of the iPad could really be assessed. No doubt, the success of the iPad has fueled the consumption of digital content in general. But the iPad has also spawned a number of new digital textbook companies, such as Inkling.

Along with their embrace of the iPad, consumers have also bought e-readers in higher-than-expected numbers. Only about 5% of millennials own e-readers according to a recent Pew Study on the adoption of electronic gadgetry, but undoubtedly, the exploding popularity of trade e-books will impact the acceptance of e-textbooks.

Just as new devices have helped spawn the growth in e-books, Xplana also points to some significant developments around open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks. States and institutions have embarked on a number of OER initiatives to help address the affordability and availability of textbooks, including Washington State's Open Course Library project, a program that aims to make core college materials available on the Web for less than $30 per class.

But Do Students Really Want E-Textbooks?

Making textbooks affordable addresses one of the major complaints that college students have about the cost of their education. But are e-books available at the right price yet? And even if they are, do students actually want digital textbooks?

An oft-cited study by the Book Industry Study Group found that 75% of college students say they prefer print textbooks. But Xplana says that rather than take that study as a sign that students will refuse use digital books, we should instead marvel that, at a time when only 1% of college textbooks are available in an electronic format, that already 25% of college students say they prefer to study this way.

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.

Additional findings:

• Students love a bargain. Survey respondents said they often buy previous editions of a textbook (16% did this for their current class ) or international versions (18% did this at least once).


• Piracy is pervasive. More than 40% of survey respondents said they bought a textbook from a pirate website, or know others who have. In addition, many respondents reported copying their friends' textbooks.


• Some learning tools have high value. Print study guides, Campus Learning Management Systems -- such as Blackboard and WebCT -- and diagnostic self-tests held high value for survey respondents.


• Some learning tools have low value. Online tutoring, audio study guides and "clickers" used in the classroom by instructors held low value for survey respondents.

The 12% who did favor e-textbooks -- "mostly males, and often MBA-seeking or distance learners" -- said they valued the "lower cost, convenience and portability."

Textbook photo by Nina Scaletti | other sources: ResourceBlog

The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010.

As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction.

Wolfram Alpha iPad App

Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves.

So far, Amazon's Kindle and other e-book readers haven't made a major dent in the textbook market and the early experiments with e-textbooks on the Kindle have been met with little success. At the same time, though, textbook publishers (who are always looking for ways to cut down on the used book market) will surely embrace the iPad, either by publishing books through their own apps and bookstores, or by releasing books through Apple's, Amazon's or B&N's e-book stores.

Interactive Textbooks

Given the amount of interactivity that's possible with books on the iPad, we can only hope that publishers will make good use of the device's capabilities. While just publishing a static book on the iPad might be good enough for some subjects, Penguin's recent demonstration of interactive books clearly shows the potential of interactive books on the iPad. At the same time, though, publishing textbooks is already an expensive business, so it remains to be seen how many interactive textbooks we will actually see.

(via: TUAW)

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."

BigWords is a site and iPhone app that source a slew of online retailers to get students the cheapest possible textbooks, taking the legwork out of online comparison shopping. BigWords also claims to optimize prices by looking for multi-item specials, shipping discounts, coupons, and other exceptional deals. Students (or textbook-shopping parents and guardians) can also share "bookbags" with others, and the site claims an average $225 savings on multi-item orders.

Study Socially

When students can use Facebook Connect to sign into an app designed to optimize study time, you know the world has changed. StudyBlue takes advantage of your virtual Rolodex to help you share notes, flashcards, and other study tools. Notes can be recorded as text or as multimedia content - that means you can share audio and video with your class-skipping colleagues. If only it counted as attendance, no? Best of all, the StudyBlue team has announced mobile capabilities for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Another app we like in this space is Quizlet, an online flashcard and quizzing resource that also uses Facebook Connect.

Rent and Return Textbooks

BookRenter soothes the eternal frustration of spending a triple-digit amount on a textbook you'll use for four months and then resell to your college's bookstore for a princely ten bucks. Renters register and have access to the company's catalog of millions of titles. Prices are refreshingly reasonable; shipping options and rental periods are flexible; and return shipping is free.

Situate Yourself

DesignYourDorm is a new-this-year app that allows college students to design their dorm room interiors in 3D and purchase their decor selections online. Not only can students often choose their exact room dimensions and layout from the DYD database and collaborate with dormmates to get rooms furnished based on thorough checklists; parents can also send care packages from a gallery that calls to mind an edible version of 1800Flowers.

Mobilize Your Textbooks

Coursesmart, a leader in the e-textbook game, just released an iPhone app, which we reviewed recently. Their catalog so far includes 7,000 ebooks, and their software works for both Macs and PCs. The desktop apps also allow students to take notes while reading, and both desktop and mobile apps have built-in search function.

Research on the Fly

The mobile version of Wikipedia has long been available for on-the-go consumption, but did you know Wikipedia also just released an official iPhone app, which we recently reviewed? You can also try iPhone apps such as Wapedia, Wikiamo, or Wikipanion.

Get Yourself and Your Group On-Task

Remember the Milk is one app we like for individual or group tasks. This full-featured program allows users to keep track of tasks through RSS feeds, share tasks via email, add tasks via email or SMS, and even assign tasks a specific location. There's an iPhone app, and RTM plays nicely with Gmail, Twitter, and Google Calendar, as well.

Hit 'Em With Your Best Shot

Finally, after all your hard work and study, you'll need to create a certain number of papers, presentations, projects, and perhaps even a website or two during your time in school this year. We have a whole list of code-free website creation tools that range from easy to use to ridiculously easy to use, and with a little finessing, they'll definitely impress a professor or two. For creating multimedia presentations, we like Empressr, Drop.io, and SlideShare, all of which have different social sharing/embedding and multimedia capabilities.

Back to Basics

For staying organized, keeping in touch, taking notes, and generally keeping yourself sane, your old friends are more useful now than ever. And by "old friends," we mean those apps you already use so much you don't even realize they're apps anymore. Try seeing Facebook, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Gmail, Twitter, and Skype as study and communication tools rather than just time-wasters, and you'll notice that you can get a lot done on your favorite sites.

So, what apps are you using to get organized, get smart, get together, or just get it right this year? Let us know in the comments!

Kindle DX and Texbooks

The new Kindle DX is geared towards the textbook market, but Forrester warns that universities will be slow to adopt the technology. The schools that Forrester talked to had no plans to encourage students to use the Kindle and the current pilot project only involves a small number of students (50 at Pace, for example). Of course, this is also a classic chicken and egg problem. Textbook publishers will look at the adoption of the Kindle in schools and are unlikely to invest heavily in this technology unless they see a growing market for their content, while students are unlikely to show interest in eReaders unless all of their textbooks are available in this format.

Looking into the Future: Price, Color, Video - and the End of the Chain Bookstore

Forrester also predicts that the eReader market will soon expand beyond books, especially once eInk technology becomes more mature and maybe even allows for color reproductions. Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps expects that newspapers, magazines, comics, and business and personal documents will also soon become more important, especially as other vendors besides Amazon start to produce more compelling devices and user experiences.

We received this report just after we wrote about Google's expected entry into the eBook market this morning, but the report clearly vindicates Google's interest in this market. Forrester thinks that other players like Apple, RIM, Borders, and Barnes & Noble might try to enter this market either with hardware products or by offering distribution platforms. Epps, however, argues that while traditional chain booksellers will try to enter the eBook market, their real estate holdings will weigh them down and make it hard, or even impossible, for them to compete with Amazon.

Overall, we agree with Forrester's assessment of the eBook market. Obviously, we are still very early in the eBook and eReader cycle. It will be interesting to see if any new players will be able to establish themselves in the next year or so, or if we will see a convergence between dedicated eReaders and other mobile devices. Wattpad, one of the larger mobile eBook players, just released an interesting metrics report (PDF), and this company sees about 78% of its eBook usage within the U.S. from iPhone users. Consumers are clearly interested in eBooks, but they are also willing to try out new devices. Even though the Kindle has virtually locked up the market today (at least in the U.S.), the business is still small enough to allow other players to successfully enter the market and be able to conquer the mainstream market.

Reading Textbooks is Different from Reading a Novel

Reading textbooks is a very different activity from reading a regular book. Students, hopefully, don't just read the text, but actively take notes, highlight sections, and annotate their texts. While the Kindle offers some of these functions, the absence of a touchscreen makes for a rather clunky experience.

In addition, students who use notetaking software would probably also want to be able to copy-and-paste text and images from their eBooks to their favorite software (Microsoft has been pushing its OneNote application heavily on college campuses, for example). Kindle eBooks also won't allow users to print any part of the text.

With a dedicated hardware device like the Kindle, students lose all of these abilities and gain relatively little compared to using the laptops they already own. Of course, the Kindle is a great eBook reader, and its screen makes reading a lot easier. But for the purpose of studying, it will remain to be seen if Amazon can find ways around some of the disadvantages a dedicated eBook reader would have over a good desktop application that students could use on their laptops.

Let Us Know What You Think

Let us know what you think of the Kindle as a dedicated textbook reader in the comments, especially if you are currently a college student or instructor.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Chrysaora.