Digital textbook firm Kno launched on Wednesday a new Facebook app, Textbooks for Facebook, allowing readers to access books right from the world’s largest social network.Kno will be the first major eBook reader company to create an application customized for a social networking platform.
Kno has decided to transition away from its oversize dual-screen tablet and focus more on the educational content it planned to put on the tablets by making thousands of textbooks available on Facebook.
At first glance, it’s not a bad idea, considering the number of students that use Facebook already. Kno plans to become an e-book distributor; when students buy e-textbooks from them, the company will make it available through Facebook, a Web-based reader and even an iPad app that launched in June.
Kno will provide more than just text and pictures, too. The e-textbooks will be able to turn diagrams into quizzes simply by obscuring the parts of the diagram or their descriptions, making it easy for readers to test themselves. Another feature will create a journal that catalogs all the highlighted passages and notes the reader makes, compiling them into one easily searchable area.
In essence, the Facebook app from Kno is only a variant of its iPad app that also features the ability to post directly to walls from the device.
The improvements done on the iPad app includes Quizme, a feature that creates multiple-choice quizzes, and Journal, which collects notes and highlights items for easier reviews.Kno focuses on spreading the use of digital textbooks that can also be bookmarked, highlighted and written with text, but free of premium fees and development from scratch.
The company also attempts to increase interactivity and enhance other features, without the need to raise its price of around 30 to 50 percent the cost of actual textbooks. Ousama Haffar, VP of Marketing for Kno, said, “I’d like to emphasize that this is a first step.”
