Teachers create plenty of course material for their students, especially for lessons that are under constant change and development. Workbooks and other resources are of course available for teachers, but focused, tailored packages for a specific topic can be difficult to find. Amazon Ignite aims at providing a marketplace for teachers to sell and buy these resources.

Teachers upload their resources to the Ignite marketplace, A,azon checks the content and makes it available on the store. The revenue from sales is split between teachers who get 70% and Amazon that keeps the rest of the income. It looks like the Ignite store is for the US market alone (at the moment, at least).

The Ignite marketplace is flexible with content formats. Documents, slide sets, worksheets, and other formats are accepted. Resources can be .doc, .docx, .pdf, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx, or .zip files.

Amazon describes the new digital content store as follows:

“With Amazon Ignite, educators can earn money by publishing the digital lesson plans, worksheets, games and more they are already creating for their classrooms. An educator can create a profile and upload work, which goes through a content review process and is then made available for customers.”

This means that Amazon will manually (perhaps applying content review plagiarism programs) check the material teachers submit to the store. It won’t be an easy task. Teachers are used to sourcing material from wherever they can find relevant information. When they distribute the material to their own classes only, teachers probably don’t worry too much about copyright issues. When they want to sell the same material to someone else, copyright becomes a major issue.

Since Amazon is the marketplace for this material, it certainly wants to stay clear of potential copyright battles and court cases with textbook publishers.

Here is a video introduction to the Amazon Ignite:

Amazon Ignite is not the first marketplace for course material prepared by teachers, but Amazon’s key position as a digital product store means it will attract content from teachers.