Chegg is a web based application that has been making waves over recent years for seeking to redefine the text book market by bringing textbook purchase and rental into the 21st century. As part of that mission, it’s struck deals with textbook publishers, built a robust and accessible website with plenty of tools adding value to text book purchases, and begun to revitalize a market desperately in need of shake up. This week, the company unveiled a mobile web app designed to provide the same user experience with plenty of great tools (such as margin notation, highlighting, and a collected note function that allows you to view all of your notes at once for any given text segment). Moving the app to the tablet and smart phone environment makes sense for the company, as those are high growth areas (particularly among students) and netbook/notebook sales are likely to suffer as a result.
Heavy. Expensive. And obsolete.
It’s hard to imagine an industry more in need of innovation like Chegg offers. Textbook publishers essentially have a captive market in students, who will be required to purchase books at whatever outrageous markup the publishers choose to charge (and as college increasingly becomes an exclusively upper class environment, the prices have climbed accordingly, further increasing the trend towards pricing the non-affluent out of social mobility). All the competition effectively happens behind the scenes, leading to a fair degree of what amounts to price-fixing. Chegg changes all that by bringing modern technology into the picture to vastly reduce overhead and distribution costs while increasing access, providing some genuine competitive pressure to college bookstores – and with 4 and a half million users, providing an effective weight on publishers’ prices by giving them a user base worth marketing lower-cost digital books towards. It’s not a complete solution, but it’s most assuredly a step in the right direction – and with a mobile app now on offer, Chegg’s growth prospects look bright.
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This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 5:29 am and is filed under Mozilla Firefox Free Download. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
