Archive for the ‘cafescribe etextbooks’ tag
Follett Patents Annotation Sharing Feature no comments
Fourteen40, Inc., a subsidiary of Follett Higher Education Group, has received a patent for certain features of its BestNotes. This is the annotation sharing feature used by Follett’s CafeScribe digital textbook platform.
The patent (number 7,779,347 B2) covers the CafeScribe platform’s methods of indicating frequently annotated portions of an e-textbook and displaying frequently used words in annotations. These features make it easy for readers to locate the notes most useful to them among the notes of classmates, professors and any readers of the book who choose to share notes. Users subscribe to other readers with a single click, just like you’d add a friend on Facebook or follow someone on Twitter. Other innovative proprietary note-search features of the BestNotes functionality are patent pending.
I’m not an attorney, but this patent looks pretty comprehensive to me and according to the press release quoted above more are pending. Not sure how this will affect other platforms that want to share annotations; is there any wiggle room left around this? Will this have any impact on the shared popular highlights feature that Amazon recently added to the Kindle?
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Take an eTextbook for a Test Drive no comments
Follett Higher Education Group announced today that it is extending its popular Try Now, Buy Later program through the fall 2010 semester. The program lets students and professors download and use eligible etextbooks for seven days before deciding whether or not to buy the title. Currently more than 10,000 titles at Follett’s CafeScribe online digital textbook shop are eligible for the Try Now, Buy Later program.
All notes and annotations made in an etextbook during the trial period will remain intact if the title is purchased.
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CafeScribe Upgrades Digital Textbooks Search; Adds Social Networking no comments
CafeScribe has announced that it has added some new features to its digital textbook offerings. From the press release:
E-textbooks are advancing far beyond mere PDFs of hardbound editions thanks in part to powerful new search capabilities introduced today by Follett Higher Education Group. CafeScribe improvements derive directly from student needs that Follett has directly observed, gleaned from research, or heard articulated by individual students. To ensure student needs continue to drive product development, Follett has created a special early adopter program that gives a limited number of students early access to new features prior to product rollout to the larger CafeScribe user community.
The new capabilities in the latest product release now let students and educators using Follett’s CafeScribe® eBook platform easily perform robust people searches to find other digital book readers, class groups, study groups or academic interest groups anywhere in the world. Once a user discovers a potential friend or group through the CafeScribe platform, the user can request friendship or membership just as they would on other popular social networks. Once connected, groups can discuss their studies and automatically share notes using the CafeScribe social networking platform for academic applications.
In addition, digital textbook consumers can search a fast-growing collection of more than 8,500 digital books by title, author, subject, publisher or ISBN number. This makes it easy to pinpoint and purchase an assigned text or supplemental reading in a matter of seconds.
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