CourseSmart


CourseSmart, a privately held company headquartered in San Mateo, California, was a provider of eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart was founded in 2007 by publishers in higher education including Bedford, Cengage Learning, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons, and Pearson.
The CourseSmart catalog included more than 40,000 eTextbooks, representing 90 percent of the core textbooks currently in use in North American Higher Education, as well as an online catalog of eResources and other digital course materials. Available in online or offline formats, CourseSmart eTextbooks provide savings off the price of new print textbooks and gives students, faculty, partners, and institutions a new way to find and access course materials. Students and instructors have anytime, anywhere access to their required course materials from any Web browser and on many mobile devices.
In August 2009, CourseSmart was the first in the industry to develop and launch an iPhone app, followed by the industry’s first app for the iPad, which launched in the fall of 2010. Additionally in April 2011, CourseSmart launched the first eTextbook app for Android devices. CourseSmart provides access to its eTextbooks from any computer or Web-enabled device.

User access

CourseSmart-hosted content can only be printed in 10-page increments. The total number of pages that can be printed and/or copied and pasted is limited to a percent of the total number of pages in the eBook. Ebook access is limited to a specific duration of time, typically six months, depending on the eBook, and an eBook can be accessed offline by only a single device at a time.
Users may check out a maximum of five e-Textbooks for offline access at any given time.