Kno leading shift to digital textbooks

Startup Kno seeking to lead the shift in education from traditional paper and ink to interactive digital Just as more and more people are reading books on their tablets, so are students turning to digital textbooks to learn. Kno co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Osman Rashid hopes to be at the front of the line as students and teachers begin making that shift. The CK-12 Foundation, for instance, a nonprofit in Palo Alto led by Neeru Khosla, is developing digital textbooks that teachers can customize and use for free. The Twenty Million Minds Foundation in Southern California is using crowdsourcing - tapping the collective minds of researchers, professors and other experts - to produce free digital textbooks for college students. Kno is working with traditional textbook publishers to create digital textbooks that students can use on their smartphones, tablets and computers. Today in the market you can get a digital version of the same book at almost half the price, so the books are getting cheaper and the prices are continuing to go down. The publishing companies are also rolling out digital textbooks and their own learning software and services. A student wants all of their content from different publishers in one spot, to use in a consistent fashion. If you take a look at UC Berkeley, all the courses for the freshman class are covered by 29 different publishers. There's a whole thing going on with the consumerization of education, with parents and students going into the classroom and showing their teachers textbooks on their tablets and saying, Why can't I use this one? No. 2, you need publishers to deliver digital content, which can be made interactive, which is also happening. Two years ago, schools, parents, teachers and professors would say, What is a digital textbook?