Get Textbooks on Google Play

Rent from the world's largest e-book store and save it. Read notes on the Web, tablet and on the phone and highlight it and take notes

Online retailers such as Amazon, Chegg.com, Google Play, etc. offer textbook rental services. For example, students can borrow the eighth version of the "Engineering Thermodynamics Foundation" at $ 57 on Google Play - just a fraction of the cost of buying books in a traditional form for about $ 160. Lease duration varies depending on the vendor. Discounts on some textbooks are available through subscription-based services. Famous publisher Cengage offers subscription fee of $ 120 per term and unlimited access to over 20,000 digital materials including textbooks. Popular textbooks issued by Cengage have "principles of microeconomics" and "biopsy psychology". The educational publisher started the subscription service in August 2018.

Will "Netflix textbooks" succeed? Several companies, including Perlego and Bibliotech, have created an online subscription library for electronic textbooks. So far these are in relatively early stages. E-book subscription service has proven to be a difficult market - Oyster was closed in 2015 and Scribd succeeded only after removing all models that can be read. Therefore, there is no way to develop an electronic textbook subscription. Lumen Learning is designed to provide open educational resources, including what Red Hat is doing for open source software. In many cases, teachers will not use OER textbooks. It does not know that it exists because of quality problems and ease of use. It is difficult to compile and deploy it looking for available OER.

The concept of open access and open source can modify and update (libre) the idea of ​​a digital textbook which is easy to distribute in open (free). Schools, teachers, or professors can design their own open textbooks by combining open access to academic papers or other open access resources into one text or course. Open textbooks offer affordable access, especially basic and common information, and challenge traditional textbook publishing models. It is sometimes difficult to identify textbooks that may be modified or edited by the community as reliable or academic information sources.