Kno and Elsevier have just announced that they are going to work together with ebooks for students of various medical disciplines – Elsevier providing the text books and Kno the platform to read and work with the text books.

Kno is well known for their work as digital text book providers, as well as the software needed to read and work easily with those text books, and as you will know, Elsevier, is a Dutch company with a very long history in scientific and academic publishing.

The series of ebooks that are going to be made available to this new service are from the Pageburst range from Elsevier, which are the ebooks dealing with nursing and health professions.

In the words of David Straus, who is VP of products for Kno;

“This collaboration will provide students with a more interactive and feature-rich learning environment. Our innovative eBook platform and Elsevier’s respected, comprehensive educational content will enable an enhanced learning experience for students and a better teaching experience for instructors.”

The point of this is that Elsevier’s ebooks on Pageburst coupled with Kno’s platform is that it will offer students a whole slew of interactive and study tools that emulate as nearly as possible the way students traditionally work with paper text books, but with the added advantages of digital books, or as Dr. Monty Gross, Professor of Nursing at James Madison University puts it;

“Other platforms I’ve reviewed distract me from learning because they don’t work smoothly. Kno enables me to quickly import and organize my readings by course. Highlighting text and making a note is also very easy. Overall, Kno is a great learning tool because you don’t notice it when you use it; the focus is on the material not the technology.”

It is precisely this concentrating on creating a work situation in which the material is central, not the technology, that is as transparent as possible, so in no way a distraction for the student – which as we all know very well is the problem with using tablets and computers.. the constant temptation to check emails, Facebook and so on…

So, a useful advance in text book technology for all medical and nursing students is here……

Link to Pageburst: www.pageburst.com.

Link to Kno: www.kno.com

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Do you think that this approach to digital books is a useful tool for students, or do you feel that traditional paper text books are all students actually need? Do share any thoughts you might have on this with others here.