Behind Your Business

No amount of ingenuity seems able to squeeze textbooks into a credit-card-size space.

In our digital age, miniaturization rules.

This is a welcome thing -- in most cases. Squeezing two billion transistors onto a small chip? All good. Squeezing an enormous printed textbook down to iPhone-size? Not so good.

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

The standard-size printed textbook provides a maximum amount of text and graphics in a single view. Once cracked open, two facing pages supply about 155 square inches, or 1,000 square centimeters, of real estate, an expanse populated by hundreds of words; the occasional chart, table or photograph; and restful white space. All of that is visible without clicking, zooming or swiping.

The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space. CourseSmart, a software company in San Mateo, California, is trying anyway.

Last month, it released an iPhone application called eTextbooks, which lets students read their textbooks on the phone. The app itself is free; students buy access rights for a particular textbook title, which is priced at about half the cost of the printed version. The price includes access to the eTextbook via a Web browser, which the company has offered since 2007.

CourseSmart was founded by five major textbook publishers -- Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and the Bedford, Freeman, Worth Publishing Group -- and now has a catalog of more than 7,000 eTextbook titles.

It's easy to see why students would want to lug around fewer textbooks -- and read them instead on their laptops. It's also easy to see why they might not want to sign up a...

No amount of ingenuity seems able to squeeze textbooks into a credit-card-size space.

In our digital age, miniaturization rules.

This is a welcome thing -- in most cases. Squeezing two billion transistors onto a small chip? All good. Squeezing an enormous printed textbook down to iPhone-size? Not so good.

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

The standard-size printed textbook provides a maximum amount of text and graphics in a single view. Once cracked open, two facing pages supply about 155 square inches, or 1,000 square centimeters, of real estate, an expanse populated by hundreds of words; the occasional chart, table or photograph; and restful white space. All of that is visible without clicking, zooming or swiping.

The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space. CourseSmart, a software company in San Mateo, California, is trying anyway.

Last month, it released an iPhone application called eTextbooks, which lets students read their textbooks on the phone. The app itself is free; students buy access rights for a particular textbook title, which is priced at about half the cost of the printed version. The price includes access to the eTextbook via a Web browser, which the company has offered since 2007.

CourseSmart was founded by five major textbook publishers -- Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and the Bedford, Freeman, Worth Publishing Group -- and now has a catalog of more than 7,000 eTextbook titles.

It's easy to see why students would want to lug around fewer textbooks -- and read them instead on their laptops. It's also easy to see why they might not want to sign up a...