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The new application from CourseSmart, eTextbooks, is aimed at providing the college textbooks over the iPhone and iPod Touch.
eTextbooks is the companion tool meant for those who have subscribed for the textbook service from CourseSmarttext. This is a service which provides the user with a provision for downloading or online viewing of more than 7000 titles.
The application is free, but it the user will be able to view only those books that have been subscribed them. This service will be active only with an active internet connection. The free version does not enable the users to add or edit notes. But CourseSmart has put this on the coming-soon list.
But there are provisions for viewing those notes that have been added using the PC. Keyword searches are supported and this has the provision for skimming the books by finger-flipping through thumbnails of each page.
Long sessions of reading may make it burdensome, as the app does not have the provision to reflow the text to fit the screen the way, say, the Kindle app does. Each page is more or less a static image, much like a PDF. There are options to zoom in, scroll around, rotate into landscape mode, and so on.
