Beginning with existing publications or drafts of textbook support material, you can have dynamic, value-added educational tools to encourage textbook adoption, repeat sales, and the adoption of the latest edition. We can design the presentation of the content, organize it on disks and web sites, duplicate the disks for inclusion in textbooks or for distribution as a separate item, and host and maintain the supporting web sites. NetDisks use the advantages of the delivery of material on diskette and CD-ROM with the flexibility and accessibility of the internet. NetDisks might include textbook supplementary material, instructor manuals, test banks, and visual aids, distributed on diskettes or CD-ROMs that accompany a textbook. Material can be linked to web sites for updating and access to discussion groups.
Web sites can collect additional course material shared by adopters of the book.
Material on NetDisks are distributed either as stand-alone documents that require no additional programs to use, or as documents with their own, free reader. In either case, NetDisk documents include a hyperlinked table of contents, key word search, hyperlinks to web sites that support the disk, and a host of other features. When a user selects a link to a web site, the NetDisk automatically launches the user's browser and accesses the appropriate pages. The user is not required to remember or enter an internet address. Student focused web sites can include discussion forums, links to internet resources to aid in research, automatic email forwarding to the instructor's mail account set up for this particular course, key word searches to help the student locate material relevant to the current course topic, and the ability to take notes on the net disk while the material provided by the instructor remains protected.