18 April 2019
Western Sydney University (WSU) has announced the extension of its partnership with ProQuest to offset the cost of textbooks. Through WSU’s digital textbook programme, all 10,000 first-year students at the university’s 10 teaching campuses located across the Western Sydney region in Australia receive access to textbooks through Ebook Central, ProQuest’s e-book platform. More than 200 titles from 60 leading academic publishers are available electronically at no cost to students via the WSU library.
In addition to being no-cost for students, the digital textbooks offer some advantages over hard copy materials. They allow for anytime, anywhere access, and they can be read online or downloaded onto the preferred devices of staff and students, including smartphones and tablets. Users can search textbooks for keywords, phrases and concepts. As in a physical book, they can highlight, cite and annotate directly in each text. In addition, the WSU library uses reading lists from the Leganto coursepack service so students can link directly to the titles they need from course syllabi.