И ещё об электронных учебниках, но онлайновых: Chegg

Chegg is finally going digital, and is going to be steadily rolling e-textbooks on its platform with goal of offering millions of e-textbooks to students by the end of the year. Second, Chegg has partnered with a number of publishers (including four of the top five educational publishers) to offer e-textbooks to its students, such as Cengage Learning, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Macmillan, McFarland, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Pearson Higher Education, Rowman & Littlefield, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley. For background, Chegg was founded in 2007 and has become the largest textbook rental giant for college students. In fact, millions of students across 7,000 campuses are using Chegg for rentals. But in a space with a number of other competitors, such as BookRenter, CampusBookRentals, and eCampus, and others; the company has expanded its strategy beyond just rentals to compete in the space.

With the digital books offering, students can download HTML5 formatted, browser-based e-textbooks that can be ready on any device, including an iPad. Each book will come with one-click subject navigation and include the ability to highlight, take notes and search directly in the book.

Revenue, according to our calculations in January were around $150 million, and that number has probably grown since then. Rosensweig confirms that revenue is “growing nicely,” especially now that the company has added new revenue streams with daily deals, and through premium services offered by the company’s acquired technologies. In fact, he says that all revenue channels have increased. Beyond just revenue, there are those rumors of a planned IPO for Chegg. Rosensweig said this of a public offering: If it makes sense, we will consider it. Right now, we are seeing very good growth, and have a good amount of financing. Chegg has raised $219 million to date, most recently adding $75 million to its coffers last Fall.

Один из крупнейших прокатчиков учебников США начинает сдавать в прокат онлайновые цифровые учебники. Судя по тому, как сделано, понимаешь, что в России одни сервисы, кхм, стриминговые, к этому не готовы, а другие — типа “электронных библиотечных систем”, выглядят как унылое pdf-in-flash.