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This blog is dedicated to the topics of Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education. it is intended as an information source for the college store industry, or anyone interested in how course materials are changing. Suggestions for discussion topics or news stories are welcome.

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Monday, May 19, 2008

CourseSmart partners with Ingram Digital Ventures

Just a quick note today --

In a non-surprising, but notable news release last week, CourseSmart announced Ingram Digital Ventures (IDV) will provide the platform for delivering their e-textbook collection. For anyone not familiar with educational publishing these days, CourseSmart is a company founded by six of the largest higher education textbook publishers (now five, since Cengage bought Hougton Mifflin). IDV is a division within Ingram, and provides a range of services -- VitalSource and Lightning Source being among perhaps the more common IDV companies familiar to college stores.

The partnership adds to the scalability of the e-textbook solution CourseSmart will be able to provide to the market. One interesting aspect of this arrangement is that IDV will "provide a customized e-book reader application to enrich CourseSmart eTextbooks with interactive functionalities." Given that another IDV company, VitalSource, is in the same business, it is a curious, or at least interesting, development. It will be interesting to see how similar or different the two e-reader environments are at the end of the day. The end result should provide benefit to consumers.