Why Vitalbook™
VitalBooks are a new, downloadable option for your textbooks. More powerful for users and more flexible for publishers, VitalBooks represent a significant evolutionary step forward for digital content.
For users...
You will customize your VitalBook page displays, search across as many or as few books as you like, and even create and manage your own notes and highlights. VitalBooks give you more control, more useful features, and more ways to succeed than traditional "just-a-picture-of-the-page" e-books.
For publishers…
With VitalBooks you will create downloadable digital product that you sell under your terms and through your channels. You control the process all the way from content development to final sale. VitalBooks are DRM protected, and give you the tools you need to find new opportunities as well as address some of the difficulites inherent in your current markets.
So why exactly are VitalBooks better for learning?
What makes VitalBooks so powerful for learning? First, you get the exact, complete textbook for your course, not a substitute, not a truncated version, and not just a few ancillary web pages. When you purchase the VitalBook version of your text, you get a file that's fast, effecient, mobile, and interactive…just like you.
VitalBooks are unlike any e-book format you've seen before. The format was designed specifically for the teaching and learning environment, so VitalBooks…
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Support large complex files —
Other "picture-of-a-page" formats become unmanageable at 20-30 pages, but most textbooks are hundreds of pages long. VitalBooks are
designed for efficient delivery, storage, search, and use of such large
files (and, even better, large groups of these large files!).
- Are portable — Many online books are tied to Web subscriptions available only from remote servers. A VitalBook is downloaded directly to the desktop. You own it, and it goes wherever your computer goes.
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Allow rapid search across textbooks —
Other reader programs may be able to
search through one file at a time (providing a "find next..." or a list of hits with no context), but in a VitaBook, you can search by
words or phrases across thousands of books — in just seconds. Search text, figures and tables, even your notes!
Have active learning tools —
VitalBooks allow you to make and share notes and highlights right in your text, making it your own customized, dynamic version.
- Enable linkages from other resources — You can easily insert hyperlinks to specific sections of VitalBooks from learning management systems, Microsoft Word™, PowerPoint™, .pdf or .html documents.
Content for learning
The digital environment holds great promise for the learning process. But several issues have kept students from taking full advantage of digital content. How do you manage books of considerable length? How do you engage with the content? How to make sure the content is trustworthy (and still protect intellectual property)?
The founders of VitalSource — students, teachers, and publishers — looked at every available technology but found nothing that offered a complete solution. So we created our own — the VitalBook format (*.vbk).
If you would like to learn more, please contact us.
