Copia, DMC Worldwide’s e-reading software and book retail and social networking platform, announced an agreement with the Collegiate Retail Alliance, a coalition of 50 large independent college stores, to launch a pilot program at 10 CRA member universities that will highlight Copia’s educational utility. The Copia program will be branded to each individual store and will be accessible via laptops and desktop PCs, Windows 7 and Android smartphones, the iPad other tablet devices.
The Copia platform allows users to read e-books as well as buy both physical and digital books and integrates social media functionality that allows users to connect online to share and discuss interests. Copia officials have long touted plans to offer the software for use in higher education and point to Copia’s ability to allow students to share notes (or limit access to them), conduct online discussions or allow professors to distribute notes or classwork to specific students or groups.
Joann Spyker, Copia’s v-p, higher education, said the pilot program would launch later this month and include Brigham Young University, Cornell, University of Kansas, University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Minnesota among others. The program, she said, will launch with trade books and follow with digital textbook editions by the fall. She said Copia is working with textbook publishers as well as “third-party e-text aggregators” to add the textbooks to its inventory of titles.
Spyker said that Copia hopes to expand the program to more CRA member schools by the fall of 2011. The Copia platform also offers audiobooks and will add newspapers, magazines and digital music sales before the year is out. Spyker said the pilot program will offer Copia access to close to a million students at the member universities.
“Our new partnership with Copia is another example of our ongoing commitment to helping CRA member stores develop and deploy the industry’s most successful business practices and solutions,” Richard W. McDaniel, CRA president and chairman, said. “Copia’s combination of digital content delivery, ecommerce, and social networking will offer the customers of CRA member stores an incredible new content experience.”
