CourseSmart, the world’s largest international retailer of eTextbooks, unveils its English language higher education sampling platform in the UK and Europe

5 March 2012, LONDON, UK: CourseSmart, the world’s largest provider of eTextbooks and digital course material, is today announcing the launch of its English language sampling platform for the higher education market in the UK and Europe. This platform will allow publishers to distribute textbooks for review by instructors, moving sample textbooks online and opening up to one of the fastest growing and most exciting developments in publishing.

Founded and owned by five publishers (Cengage Learning, Palgrave Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Wiley), CourseSmart currently serves over 2.5 million users worldwide and represents 90% of US core higher education course material. CourseSmart’s sampling platform exists online, enabling publishers to send eTextbook samples securely to instructors and allowing instructors to search the catalogue to select titles to review.

The online sampling platform will allow publishers to seamlessly and securely send digital book samples to instructors, thereby:

• Saving money through reduced sampling costs
• Gathering better data from sampling to tailor their offering 
• Offering their instructors multi platform access to digital books
• Participation in a highly discoverable platform for instructors

Benefits to instructors are:

• Single password access to a multi-publisher sampling system
• Anytime anywhere access to eTextbooks
• Instant access to any book on the platform

“CourseSmart has delivered great benefits to instructors, students and publishers in the US – and we welcome its introduction to the UK and Europe with great enthusiasm. Our customers are increasingly keen to use electronic textbooks – and CourseSmart represents an additional channel for us to meet that demand”, said Jill Jones, CEO and President of Cengage Learning EMEA.

Fionnuala Duggan, Managing Director of CourseSmart International, said: “It’s a very exciting time for the publishing industry. In an era of portable devices, eTextbooks are a natural progression for today’s tech-savvy generation and our sampling platform is the first step in CourseSmart’s roll out internationally. We are delighted to be working with some of the world’s leading publishers to offer a wide range of eTextbooks to the UK market.”

Contact information

Haifa Varju and Danae Mercer, kwittken + company on behalf of CourseSmart

Tel: +44 (0)20 7401 8001

Email: hvarju@kwitco.com or dmercer@kwitco.com