On Wednesday, Chegg, which now bills itself as an online “student hub,” said that it is partnering with ed tech darling du jour, Coursera, to provide digital content, including textbooks and other materials, to students enrolled in its massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Through the partnership, Coursera students will be able to purchase Chegg material, as well as receive some publisher content for free. They will also be able to make use of other Chegg features, including Q&A forums, search and highlight options. Coursera students could still purchase content from other sources, but the company said it offers lower prices than other vendors and students wouldn’t benefit from the social options connected to Chegg content.

The companies declined to share financial details of the deal. And, when asked whether similar partnerships with other MOOC providers edX and Udacity might be on the horizon, CEO Dan Rosenweig said, “Our vision is to become the leading connected learning platform… We’re not going to limit ourselves to anything.”

MOOC providers have faced more vocal challengers in recent months, but this deal underscores their steadily growing influence. Even if their completion rates hover around just 10 percent, Chegg clearly wants to be able to get in front of the millions of learning-focused eyeballs that are being drawn to Coursera.

Until now, Coursera professors have only been able to require supplemental content that is available for free on the web and recommend textbooks. Chegg said it will enable the MOOC provider to make some publisher-created content available for free during the course. Students will then have the option to purchase the full eTextbook from Chegg for continued learning after the course.

As of the partnership’s launch, just two courses will offer Chegg content but, over the next few months, the companies said it will expand to several dozen of the site’s 370 courses.

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• 65 percent of Buzzfeed’s traffic now comes from mobile devices
• How the public is reshaping media at Reddit, Vox and LinkedIn
• Content personalization still has a long way to go
• One-third of the Guardian’s readers are American, with US traffic growing 37% last year
• Tumblr CEO David Karp says at least 70 users have turned blogging into book deals
• The definitive answer of web or apps as the future of mobile content? It depends.
• The Atlantic is going to launch a paid content offering soon
• Can brands evolve from digital advertisers to mass communicators?
• Why digital book publishers are starting to embrace data
• Native advertising: winners, losers and a lot of hype
• A lesson from the blogging elite: there are many ways to the top
• Aereo CEO says free content might be on the way

Last spring, the Boston-based startup said it had raised $8 million in venture funding just as Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan Higher Education slapped it with a lawsuit alleging several violations, including copyright infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. Boundless curates and packages free online content into open textbook alternatives tailored to students’ learning needs.

In June, the startup filed a motion to dismiss a few of the claims and said the other claims were without merit. But last month, a U.S. District Court Judge in New York denied the motion to dismiss.

Undeterred, Boundless this week filed another response, requesting a trial by jury.

“In our view, such legal action [by the publishers] is an attempt to stifle startups such as Boundless who are driving innovation and using the power of the Internet to help students save money and become better learners,” Boundless CEO and founder Ariel Diaz said in a statement.

Pearson, Cengage and Macmillan Higher Education did not immediately reply to requests for comment. But in their complaint, the publishers allege that Boundless “steals the creative expression of others, willfully and blatantly violating Plaintiffs’ intellectual property rights in several of their highest profile signature textbooks.” Specifically, they say that Boundless copies “the distinctive selection, arrangement and presentation of Plaintiffs’ textbooks, along with other original text, imagery and protected expression.”

In its defense, Boundless argues that the allegations are “overly broad and legally flawed” and that the similarities between the publishers’ textbooks and their online content are the result of covering the same facts and concepts in an order necessitated by the subject matter.

Despite the legal battle, the startup has pushed on, adding more content, organizing content hackathons and releasing its content under Creative Commons. Boundless currently offers content for 18 subjects and claims that students at half of the colleges in the country use its content.

Momentum behind open educational resources is growing – California and British Columbia have backed open textbook initiatives, for example.  And as awareness and the amount of low-cost or free open educational resources grows, services, like Boundless, could help professors, students and others sift through, curate and organize it. CK-12, a non-profit that curates high quality STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) content, takes another approach to aggregating and distributing open educational content. But this ongoing legal battle highlights how disruptive this movement could be to the textbook industry.

In Inkling Habitat, the company’s founder and CEO, Matt MacInnis, sees an opportunity to take the digital reading revolution beyond Amazon and Kindle. He believes Amazon is totally reliant on text-based titles that make up only a fraction of the total book publishing market, and calls Apple’s iBooks Author — free software that’s supposed to let anyone create interactive ebooks for the iBookstore — a flop. “Our message to the industry is that the first bit of digital publishing was great,” he told me, “but the real stuff is just beginning.” It’s early days for Inkling, which has only 400 titles in its store so far compared to Amazon’s millions of Kindle titles. But MacInnis is convinced that the next step is illustrated: Textbooks, travel guides, cookbooks, how-to books, and so on. And it’s this area, he believes, where Inkling — not Amazon — will dominate.

As I reported last year, Habitat “lets publishers create interactive e-books with HD video, interactive features and 3D content in a free, cloud-based program. E-books can immediately be published to iPad [and now the iPhone] and the Web in HTML5, with updates pushed to both platforms at once…Multiple groups can collaborate on the content simultaneously, so a production editor in New York City can look at the same project as a designer in India, simultaneously.” Starting Tuesday, publishers using the platform can also export their books as EPUB files, so that they can sell them through Apple’s iBookstore and other platforms. And each book created on the platform is fully indexable by Google.

Eight months ago, MacInnis told me, the cost of taking content from a print-destined file and turning it into structured content that can be crawled by Google or easily navigated on an iPad was $30 to $60 per page. “We’ve gotten that down to $3 a page,” he said. The tool is free for publishers and consumers, though Inkling will take a 30 percent cut of each sale through the Inkling store. Beta clients included O’Reilly, Frommer’s, Workman, and Wiley; new publishing partners announced Tuesday include HarperCollins, DK, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves Kaplan and Time Inc.

Inkling is also launching a subscription enterprise product, intended to compete with Adobe, that allows clients to build products under their own brands on top of Inkling’s APIs. Clients at launch include Pearson, the world’s largest book publisher; Elsevier; and Wolters Kluwer. Presumably, the enterprise clients’ subscription fees help keep Habitat free.

Finally, Inkling is rolling out an academic model of Inkling Habitat, which is completely free and doesn’t take a cut of sales. The company is partnering with the 20 Million Minds Foundation, which is backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and will distribute 50 free, open-source textbooks to community colleges in California.

“You should be able to update content in the digital world on the fly,” he said. “In digital, the idea of a new textbook edition doesn’t exist any more.”

Since launching in 2009, the digital textbook startup has worked with about 80 publishers to bring more than 200,000 higher education and K-12 titles to all kinds of mobile and connected devices. On Tuesday, it unveiled Advance, a new free platform that lets publishers and authors turn static files or PDFs into an interactive book “in minutes.”

If schools are going to embrace digital content, Rashid says, they need to know that they can find all of the titles they need in digital form, not just a handful of them. With Advance, the company, which competes with giants like Amazon (a AMZN) and Apple and startups like Inkling and Benchprep, hopes it’s found a way to get more content onto its platform.  The platform itself is free, but Kno takes a cut of each book purchased.

To use the platform, publishers submit flat files to Kno, which the company says it can turn into an interactive format in minutes. From there, publishers can update content and add video, audio or other interactive components whenever they want. Publishers can also add end of chapter questions or other assessments, which can be captured and analyzed in Kno Me, the analytics dashboard launched last month.

While Apple’s iBooks similarly lets authors create interactive ebooks, the final product can only be accessed on iOS devices. Publishers on Advance can use the platform to create content for iOS, Android, Windows 7 and 8 and the browser.

Kno, which has raised about $69 million from top Silicon Valley VCs like Andreeseen Horowitz and SV Angel, said some of the publishers using the new platform include McGraw-Hill Education and Wayside Publishing.

“We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.”

For many news sites, HTML5 has become the default form of coding. Even if a publisher is pushing out a mobile app, it’s often an HTML app in a native wrapper. When deciding whether to follow an app or a Web browser model, the decision isn’t a technology one — native code versus HTML5 – instead, it’s a distribution decision, said Mark Johnson, CEO of news aggregator Zite.

For a startup or a company that doesn’t have a well-known brand, discoverability becomes key, so it’s necessary to stake a claim in platform app stores, Johnson said. But when it comes down to implementation Zite is basically building Web pages optimized with a native user interface. There’s far more flexibility in that approach: your Web developers suddenly don’t need to turn into Objective C programmers and you can modify your app on the server without pushing a complete update to the device, Johnson said.

As Zite builds up its own online brand (CNN acquired Zite last year), its dependence on the app store may lessen, but Johnson said the need for a slick UI will keep Zite app-store bound for some time. “People have a very high expectation of what the UI looks like,” he said. “You risk losing a lot of downloads if you forget the UI.”

The Washington Post is splitting the difference. It leans heavily on its own mobile apps, including its Facebook Social Reader, but it also has a big presence in the mobile browser. WaPo Labs chief strategist and editor-at-large Rob Malda agreed with Johnson that the Post has the advantage to leverage a huge well-respected news brand to drive traffic to the mobile Web site. “Discoverability is not a problem,” Malda said, but he added that the Post can just as easily use that same brand to nudge its readers to its apps and other digital media technologies.

Ultimately, whether the Post focuses on apps or the mobile Website, it will continue to lean heavily of HTML5 for its core development, Malda said. “I like the hybrid thing,” he said. “Laying out a newspaper – I don’t want to do that in native.”

HTML5 in a native wrapper has it’s limitations, as well. As my colleague Kevin Tofel has pointed out, the experience on the Facebook Android and iPhone apps sucks precisely because they’re HTML apps masquerading as natives. That led Kevin to start using accessing Facebook solely from his mobile browser where performance notably improved.

This post was updated to correct the name of the Boston Globe’s main news website, which is bostonglobe.com, not boston.com.

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It launched what can only be described as digital interactive coffee table recipe book centered on the theme of today’s hippest dessert: cupcakes. The iPad app (available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store) is stocked with lush interactive photographs and video, designed to entice the food fetishist in us all, and while it’s full of recipes and instructive lessons, it’s an easy app to flip through, letting you swipe between one tantalizing cupcake image to the next – just like the bound food-porn tomes that grace end tables and bookstore cookbook displays around the world.

The app is slick, which immediately raises my suspicions. In general, pretty cookbooks are a waste of money – the quantity and quality of photographs in cookbooks are usually in inverse proportion to the usefulness of the recipes they illustrate. But Bob Madden, GM and SVP of online brands for Food Network and The Cooking Channel, said his team designed the app to be a useful kitchen aid as well as eye candy. FN filled the app with instructional videos demonstrating baking and frosting techniques and it tested every recipe in FN’s San Francisco New York City test kitchens.

In addition, FN isn’t just repurposing recipes and videos from its TV shows and website for the app. It contains some cupcake ideas from Alton Brown and other network personalities, and it features a section of recipes from its FN program “Cupcake Wars,” but most of its content is original. The photos and videos were shot and the recipes collected, refined and compiled specifically for the app, Madden said.

So is Food Network, which is jointly owned by Scripps Networks Interactive and the Tribune Company, building up a side business in digital cookbook publishing? Not exactly, Madden said. The app isn’t free and it does contain advertising from Food Network sponsors, but ultimately apps like “Cupcakes” — and even FN’s print cookbook business — are designed to promote the Food Network and Cooking Channel brands. You’ll probably see more efforts like “Cupcakes” to create content that exists apart from its TV programming, Madden said, but FN looks at digital content as way to expand the content available to its core TV fan base as well as create niche or segmented content it can’t offer over its cable channels.

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a baker and my tolerance for cutesy cupcakes is low, but this app is impressive. It utilizes the new capabilities of the tablet format well. For instance there’s a frosting section that let’s you scroll through a palette of different icing colors. You tap on a frosting color and a screen pops up detailing the exact proportion of colored gels necessary to reproduce it. We’re starting to see more and more interactive cookbooks designed specifically for the tablet format. Inkling’s digital version of The Professional Chef, Food52′s Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide, and Open Air Publishing’s Mixology are all good examples.