Available in English Website BookRags.com | Owner Gradesaver LLC Alexa rank 49,203 (April 2014) | |
Type of site Internet Study guide and Lesson plan Founder(s) James Yagmin and David Lieberman | ||
BookRags is an educational website that provides summaries, study guides, and lesson plans on literary works. Based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, the website is a subsidiary of Gradesaver LLC.
BookRags was founded in 1999 by James Yagmin and David Lieberman, who had recently graduated from college. On May 15, 2008, BookRags was bought by Ambassadors Group for $18 million. The merger was a friendly takeover.
BookRags contains concise book summaries and thorough analysis of more than 6,000 literary works, which is, according to one source, the largest collection online. It also has a list of characters and their descriptions, as well as an important quotes section. The website has over 10,000 e-Books in its collection and 8,400 biographies in its database. It facilitates students purchasing duplicates of fellow students' papers.
The information on BookRags is written by professional writers and teachers. Though study guides for 157 of the most commonly taught titles, like Hamlet and To Kill a Mockingbird, are free to access, most require either an ongoing subscription or a single one-time purchase.
In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Carl Fisher, the department chair of the comparative world literature and classics at California State University, Long Beach, criticized BookRags for being "simplistic" and "forc[ing] people to pay up front".
As of September 5, 2014, BookRags operates as a subsidiary of Gradesaver, LLC.