Exclusive: What Electronic Textbook Provider Has The Biggest Library?

**Waqas** · August 17, 2011

Just about every electronic textbook company declares that it has the most books available for download.

Coursesmart calls itself “the world’s largest digital course materials provider.” Sellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon return absurdly high numbers for searches in their etextbooks sections that include novels and other general books used in classes. Textbooks.com boasts the “biggest selection of used & new college textbooks.” And a Kno executive recently told Mashable that Kno has the biggest etextbook offering on the Internet.

Up until this point, there’s really been no good way to objectively compare each company’s offerings.

Campusbooks, a 12-year-old textbook price comparison site, recently gained this ability when it expanded its database of texts across seven different etextbook makers — thus receiving access to their catalogs.

The site worked with partner booksellers to come up with a list of the 1,000 most popular textbooks for fall 2011 to use as its metric. It takes into account data that professors share with bookstores in order to help them determine demand, including which books they have selected for their upcoming classes and how many students are signed up for them. Past data is also used as part of the calculation.

“It is a relative number but overall represents the most popular books,” Campusbooks CEO Jeff Cohen says.

Here’s what percentage of the most popular 1,000 books each of these seven etextbook retailers had on hand:

CourseSmart: 82%
Amazon Kindle (ebook purchases, not rental): 58.3%
Barnes & Noble: 46.6%
Kno: 43.6%
Textbooks.com: 24.2%
Cengage Brain: 23.1%
eBooks.com: 0.2%

The data doesn’t reflect the quality of the etextbooks or their relative prices, but it’s a good indication of where digital book makers stack up when it comes to offering books that are actually used in classes — a factor that many consider key in the healthy competition among etextbook providers.

Photo courtesy of istockphoto, dlewis33

More About: books, education, etextbooks, textbooks

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