One Small Step for Schools, One Giant Leap for Education

NEW YORK, Feb. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- AMSCO School Publications, Inc. and ECTACO, Inc. are excited to announce their joint decision to become partners in the educational field. This innovative partnership will make AMSCO products more accessible to the modern marketplace. Students will be able to use AMSCO eBooks with the jetBook Color eReader, the only color e-Ink educational eBook system developed specifically for schools.

For over 75 years AMSCO has helped educate millions of students with their course texts, review, and test prep books in mathematics, language arts, science, foreign language, and social studies. ECTACO, known as the preeminent handheld language source, has developed and distributed devices and linguistic software in over 200 languages since 1990. AMSCO and ECTACO decided to unite their products and technologies when ECTACO developed a dedicated eBook reader – the ECTACO jetBook Color – which makes the reading of eBooks easier and more vision friendly; that is, it promotes "healthy reading."  

The jetBook Color eReader was conceived by ECTACO to provide schools with benefits that cut costs and increase student productivity. In addition to being the only touch-screen color e-Ink eReader in the world, it's preloaded with many academic tools and resources, such as the Oxford talking dictionaries; SAT prep courses; math, physics, chemistry, geography, and biology references; graphing, accounting, and scientific calculators; multilingual talking translators; and fluent Text To Speech tools for all books – a useful feature for students with dyslexia and other disabilities. Most significantly, it enables schools to add their own content in a multitude of formats at no additional cost. This means that every eBook purchased can instantly be loaded to the jetBook Color eReader, along with any notes, homework, and other reading materials. 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 vision friendly type of display developed exclusively for the education community.

Many schools eager to procure the jetBook Color eReader have discovered their current textbooks are not available to them in digital format by their publishers. As a result, they have sought alternative publications that could be used on the jetBook Color eReader. AMSCO has recognized this dilemma and has agreed to unite with ECTACO to address the needs of these schools nationwide. All AMSCO titles are now available for schools to review, purchase, and download through their jetBook Color eReader "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. "Among 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 convincing educators to use AMSCO content on a larger scale."

Contact Tim Houston at [email protected] or 800-784-8444 for further information.

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. 

SOURCE ECTACO, Inc.