Since first emerging early last year, Boston-based startup Boundless has been on a mission to give students a free alternative to the financial and physical costs of bulky backpacks brimming with pricey hard-copy textbooks. Co-founders Ariel Diaz, Brian Balfour and Aaron White believe that the incumbents, the old-school textbook publishers (the top four of which still control the market) have been… → Read More
Founded in 2007, Flat World Knowledge was one of the early pioneers in the move to bring free and open access to textbooks to students and educators. The independent publisher offered its learning content for free, giving students the access to texts in print, eBook form, eReaders, audiobooks and downloadable PDFs, etc. Produced by actual authors and reviewed by peers, Flat World allows teachers… → Read More
Since its launch in 2009, Inkling has been on a mission to reinvent publishing for the mobile, digital era by building engaging, interactive learning content from the ground up for the iPad. Initially focused on higher ed, this year Inkling has been expanding its scope, moving into consumer-facing titles and continuing education, along with making its content available on other platforms, like the… → Read More
SimpleTuition, a company that offers online tools, tips and advice to college students to help them save money on education-related expenses, is announcing this morning that is has acquired ValoreBooks, an online textbook marketplace that offers discounts on rentals as well as new and used textbooks.
Launched in 2006, SimpleTuition has been on a mission to help students reduce the seemingly… → Read More
In 1998, seeing an underserved niche in the textbook market, Jeff Sherwood and his three co-founders launched BIGWORDS. By the beginning of 2000, they had grown from a team of four to a team of 250, had a warehouse in Kentucky, raised close to $80 million in outside funding, made a few commercials featuring Tom Green and even had a $100 million acquisition offer from a young Amazon. Although it… → Read More
Since it first appeared earlier this year, Boston-based educational startup Boundless has been on a mission to ensure that college students have a free alternative to the pricey and bulky world of physical textbooks. The startup believes that an oligopoly of textbook publishers has been driving up costs for years (as the four top publishers currently control the lion’s share of the market) and so… → Read More
It seems it’s a big news day for eBooks and eTextbooks. Google is winding down its eBook service for indie publishers, while Apple and top publishers are the subjects of domestic and European probes into eBook price-fixing.
On top of that, Boston-based educational startup Boundless Learning, which is trying to offer students an open alternative to textbooks (and even eTextbooks), is itself on… → Read More
“We are not trying to redefine the textbook,” Kno CEO Osman Rashid tells me, “we are trying to redefine how you learn.” Today, Kno is taking a big steps towards making digital textbooks more social by making 100,000 college textbooks available both on its Website and on Facebook. The Textbooks for Facebook app and site will present the books via an HTML5 reader. So students who buy a book via … → Read More
The death of print has long been on the minds of journalists, writers, bloggers, etc. For those of us who grew up reading our books on paper, asking for magazine subscriptions, and watching our dads read the paper (on paper) at the breakfast table, it’s hard to imagine a world without a book case, and the handful of novels we never got around to picking up yet.
In South Korea, there seems to be… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
