One small step for schools, one giant leap for education

Feb 15, 2012

February 15, 2012 - New York, NY

One small step for schools, one giant leap for education.

AMSCO School Publications, Inc. and ECTACO, Inc. partner to finally bridge the gap between students and eTextbooks with the jetBook Color, the only color E Ink educational eBook system developed specifically for schools.

For over 70 years AMSCO has contributed to educating millions of people with their textbooks. ECTACO, known as the preeminent handheld language source, has developed and distributed devices and linguistic software in over 200 languages since 1990. A natural union of both companies occurred when ECTACO developed a dedicated eBook reader - ECTACO jetBook Color - which carries the highly regarded concept of "healthy reading".

The jetBook Color was conceived by ECTACO to provide schools with benefits that cut costs and increase student productivity. Alongside being the only touchscreen color E Ink eReader in the world, it's preloaded with many academic tools and resources such as the Oxford talking dictionaries and SAT prep courses; Math, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, and Biology references; graphing, accounting, and scientific calculators; multilingual talking translators; fluent Text To Speech for all books - a useful feature for students with dyslexia and more. Most significantly, it enables schools to add their own content in a multitude of formats at no additional cost. This means that every eTextbook purchased can instantly be loaded to the jetBook Color, along with any notes, homework, and other reading materials as well. The revolutionary color ePaper display delivers a high-contrast, sunlight readable, low-power performance that further closes the digital divide between paper and electronic displays. This is the only eye friendly type of display developed exclusively for the education community.

Many schools eager to procure the jetBook Color have discovered their current textbooks are not made available to them in digital format by their publishers. As a result, they have sought alternative publications that could be implemented into jetBook Color. AMSCO has recognized this dilemma and been considerate in uniting with ECTACO to address the needs of many schools nationwide. All AMSCO titles are now available for schools to review, purchase, and download through their jetBook Color "textbook console". "Schools continued to ask us about which publishers we were aware of that could provide them with PDFs or ePUB or other formats compatible with their curriculums", states David Lubinitsky, CEO, Ectaco, Inc. "Amongst all the publishers we reached out to, AMSCO stepped to the forefront of addressing the needs of those schools expeditiously - our orders have increased significantly as a result of this union and we look forward to convince educators to use AMSCO content on a larger scale."

Contact Tim Houston at timothy.houston@ectacoinc.com or 800-784-8444 for further information.

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AMSCO is dedicated to providing high quality, inexpensive textbooks and support materials to the educational community. Their course texts, review, and test prep books reflect national and state standards for curriculum and assessment.

ECTACO, Inc., is a New York based company specializing in multilingual global communications, with more than 21 years of experience, 18 offices and millions of satisfied customers.