There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.
To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?
Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?
Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!
1 comment so far ↓
Yeah, I would avoid CourseSmart. In summary:
The CourseSmart interface and experience is a crime against productivity, a prime example of how not to use today’s technology, and reveals how paranoid draconian DRM systems hurt paying customers more than it protects the intellectual property. The information age is supposed to increase productivity and ease of access, Course”Smart” does exactly the opposite.
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