Digital Textbook platforms
September 26, 2024 | Author: Maria Lin
These services provide free or paid educational materials for students. Some of the most popular digital textbook platforms are listed below.
See also: Top 10 eBook Readers
See also: Top 10 eBook Readers
2023. Pooks.ai creates personalized learning books

Pooks.ai is a new platform aimed to enhance reading and learning experience using AI. It provides a large collection of e-books and audiobooks, embeds personalized content in them and sets up individual preferences. AI personalized books are often generated in real-time or with minimal delay. Pooks.ai also tracks user learning style, preferred subjects/topics and even favorite historical period. E-books on Pooks.ai are available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats, while audiobooks are provided as m4b and .mp3 files. There is no cost for ebooks and $9.95 if you choose to add the audiobook.
2022. Pearson releases new curated videos in their textbook app

Pearson launched the digital textbook platform Pearson+ a year ago and they now have 4.5 million registered users and 330,000 paid subscribers. The company has recently unveiled several new features for the back-to-school season, including engaging and tailored content to suit students' preferred study methods and dynamic, interactive videos. The video system, known as Channels, includes over 10,000 short-form videos, curated, selected and organized by experts into 16 subject areas, with a focus on science, math and business—challenging topics where many students seek video-based tutoring. For this initial release, Channels is available to all college students at no cost, even if they are not using a Pearson textbook.
2021. Pressbooks adds Directory collections

The Pressbooks Directory, much like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (but with fewer jokes about towels), has been delightfully revamped to improve its usability and general aesthetic charm. Among its shiny new features are human-curated collections—delightfully themed assemblages of open educational resources (OER) designed to guide the bewildered, inspire the ambitious, and subtly nudge humanity toward a more open educational universe. These collections aren’t just pretty stacks of knowledge; they’re shining examples of what excellent OER can be, from straightforward textbooks to whiz-bang interactive tools brimming with multimedia, student feedback loops, and built-in assessments. They serve as templates for crafting new open textbooks, arguments for investing in OER, and proof that educational resources can be both practical and rather exciting, provided one isn’t too bogged down by Vogon-like bureaucracy.
2019. Perlego - textbook subscription service

Dubbed “Spotify for textbooks,” Perlego allows students to access textbooks on a subscription model. It hosts over 300,000 eBooks from more than 2,300 publishers and the service is cross-platform—accessible via the web as well as iOS and Android apps—and available in several languages. In addition to U.K. publishers, Perlego now also features content from major publishers in Germany, the Nordics and Italy. For students, the appeal is clear: textbooks are becoming increasingly costly to buy and public libraries are often underfunded. In the U.K., Perlego provides access to its entire digital collection for £12 per month. As long as the required textbooks are available on the platform, this is significantly more economical.
2018. Perlego - Spotify for textbooks

The new service Perlego offers students and professionals unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of academic and professional eBook titles for £12 per month. To achieve this, it collaborates with 650 publishers, including prominent names like Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Macmillan Higher Education and Cengage Learning. Publishers receive 65 percent of each subscription on a usage-based model. Perlego claims it helps publishers monetize their content to a large group of budget-conscious students who might otherwise purchase their books from the used-book market or download pirated versions. It also provides publishers with detailed insights into the usage of their titles.
2015. New Kindle Textbook Creator allows to create ebooks for students

Amazon introduced a new tool for its Kindle Direct Publishing authors through a new KDP EDU branch aimed at educators and academic institutions. It's called the Kindle Textbook Creator and it allows authors to prepare digital textbooks for students, suitable for publication on Fire tablets, Android devices, iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs. It’s somewhat similar to iBooks Author for Apple and iTunes U, but it starts with PDFs of existing texts and adds enhanced digital features for Kindle-based consumption. Kindle Textbook Creator appears to be designed for efficiency and for integration with the traditional textbook publishing industry, unlike iBooks Author, which is more focused on helping educators create digital-native experiences from scratch.
2014. Apple iBooks Textbooks Now Available in 51 Countries

Imagine, if you will, a peculiar little corner of the universe called Pubslush, a place where books hatch into being not through arcane publishing rituals but via the delightfully improbable mechanism of crowdfunding. This wholly bookish platform, launched way back in the ancient mists of August 2012 (roughly a year and a half ago, for those keeping galactic time), invites aspiring authors to woo readers into financially backing their most harebrained literary dreams. Not content with merely funding, it also lets publishers strut about with branded crowdfunding pages, where they can build a community, charm readers, and puff up their company image—all while possibly revolutionizing how stories see the light of day. Authors, meanwhile, can dabble in a mere thirty days of crowdfunding and then opt to self-publish, or perhaps flaunt their glittering numbers to snag a traditional publisher. But here’s the kicker: Pubslush, like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, isn’t just a cash-raising contraption—it’s a cosmic validation tool, proof positive that your idea doesn’t just have legs; it’s already dancing across the universe.
2013. Google Play to sell and rent digital textbooks

Come August, Google will bravely leap into the bustling, ink-scented world of textbooks, offering both sales and rentals of digital versions through the delightfully click-worthy Google Play Books store. In a move that suggests someone at Google has been making polite yet persuasive phone calls, they’ve teamed up with the five grand pooh-bahs of textbook publishing. Students, those perpetually underfunded warriors of academia, will have the option to snag digital tomes outright or rent them for a whimsical six-month stint. Prices, Google assures us with the nonchalant confidence of someone juggling quantum physics and cat videos, will be “up to 80 percent” lower than their lumbering, paper-based cousins—a claim that sounds suspiciously familiar to anyone browsing Amazon’s Kindle textbook rentals. At present, Google’s selection of digital textbooks is modest, featuring works from publishers less likely to have their own Wikipedia pages, and rental options are nowhere to be found. But make no mistake, this foray into the textbook cosmos is a calculated move to square off against Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple, who’ve already staked their flags in this lucrative corner of the digital frontier.
2013. Kno Me helps students monitor their progress as they read

Kno, the intelligent educational book reading app (and retailer), unveiled a new offering today at CES - Kno Me. It’s a personalized study dashboard that aids students in tracking their progress as they read. The dashboard enables students to check-in to see real-time statistics on their study habits, time allocation, interaction rates and advancement. It allows students to view the average time they spend engaging with textbooks, the percentage of pages marked with annotations, glossary terms mastered and more. Users can then share these outcomes with classmates or track the engagement levels of their peers. Kno Me is currently accessible on all Kno interactive textbooks for iPad, Windows 8 and web browsers and will soon be compatible with Android and Windows 7.