Coursera Partners With Chegg To Offer Gratis, DRMed Textbooks for Courses

An anonymous reader writes with news on Coursera partnering with publishers to give students access to more textbooks. From the article: "Online learning startup Coursera on Wednesday announced a partnership with Chegg, a student hub for various educational tools and materials, as well as five publishers to offer students free textbooks during their courses. Professors teaching courses on Coursera have previously only been able to assign content freely available on the Web, but as of today they will also be able to provide an even wider variety of curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student." Zero cost, but not without cost: "Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education,Oxford University Press SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader, to Coursera students. We are also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and other publishers. ... The publisher content will be free and available for enrolled students for the duration of the class. If you wish to use the e-textbook before or after the course, they will be available for purchase."

Support?

[Murdoch5]

I once rented an online book from some company for a statistic's course. Much like this company I had to download an e-reader which was released by the company itself to read my DRM enabled book. The problem was the e-reader app was horrible and only worked on Windows and Mac. Now I can accept the fact a Linux version wasn't available and I'm okay with that but even with in Windows large portions of the book just wouldn't render correctly, I was left with incomplete formulas and totally unreadable paragraphs. Not to mention if my date wasn't set PERFECTLY I couldn't even open the stupid reader in the first place.

If this company can pull it off and manage to release ebooks that have good readers attached, that render perfectly and are supported on Window, Mac and possible Linux then I'm totally on board with it. Other wise it really is more of a hassle then buying the book in the first place.

As much as I complained about buying books when I was in school, I usually use them for reference now. I find myself opening old Micro-controller books to get over a weird glitch or I open the calculus book to figure out a small issue. So well I did hate textbooks initially, I'm rather glad I kept most them now, 8 years later.

The Right To Read

[Mr. Slippery]

DRM'ed textbooks...more and more it looks like we're headed for the world RMS envisioned in The Right To Read [gnu.org].