Barnes & Noble's Digital Textbook Rental Service Is Great, Except For The Downloading Your Textbook Part

The Consumerist: "Before you spend money on a time-sensitive e-textbook rental from Barnes & Noble's new NOOKstudy application, take a look through the complaints that have popped up in the past few days on the bookseller's customer forum. Several threads exist where students are complaining that their rentals aren't coming through, but it seems B&N's tech support was away for the weekend because there's been no official response yet"

Barnes & Noble College Booksellers Brings Textbook Rental Program to Hundreds of Campuses This Fall - MarketWatch

 My late father-in-law founded the B&N College Division.

Barnes & Noble College Booksellers Brings Textbook Rental Program to Hundreds of Campuses This Fall - MarketWatch: "With the rapid expansion of their rental program, Barnes & Noble has solidified its position as the single source for college students seeking more price and format options for their educational materials. All Barnes & Noble college bookstores carry new, used, custom, and unbundled textbooks, each at different price points. Additionally, all of the company's campus bookstores offer thousands of eTextbooks, many of which are read using NOOKstudy(TM) by Barnes & Noble, an innovative new study platform and software solution for higher education. Download or learn more about NOOKstudy at www.nookstudy.com/college."

Barnes & Noble Unveils 'Nook Study' App, Textbook Rentals

Barnes & Noble Unveils 'Nook Study' App, Textbook Rentals | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: "Barnes & Noble on Tuesday announced a new Web-based textbook rental service as well as Nook Study, a software download for college students that lets them access class materials on a PC or Mac. Textbook rental will be available on BN.com/textbooks, and students can borrow class materials for 60, 90, or 130 days, with the option to extend the rental for up to 125 days or purchase the book. Books can be returned free with Barnes & Noble-provided UPS shipping labels."

Copia vs NookStudy/Blackboard in College Market?

From The Digital Reader:

I admit we don’t really know what Blackboard adds (to NookStudy), but I think it’s reasonable to assume that students will be able to share their notes, highlights, and other annotations with other students. This could be very similar to what Copia does. Of course, no one has seen either app is talking about it, so what do we know.

If I’m right, then right now Copia are in a race with B&N. They need to get their app out of beta and on to the market before B&N release Nookstudy. If they don’t, then Copia have pretty much lost the academic market. ...

B/N and Blackboard Announce Strategic Partnership

A very shrewd alliance. From CrunchGear:

Barnes & Noble continues to makes inroads into the education, um, space. It just announced that it has teamed up with Blackboard, the Web site/software suite that is used in colleges all over the U.S. (Lord knows I had to use it all the time.) The deal should ensure that college students, starting with the upcoming fall semester, have easy access to electronic textbooks.

It’ll work like this. You log into Blackboard and click over to your literature class. There you’ll find links to all (if any) electronic versions of the books you need to read for the semester, making it easy to purchase and download a semester’s worth of books in no time at all.

There’s also possibilities for NOOKstudy-Blackboard integration. View all your Blackboard assignments from within NOOKstudy, that type of thing. I mean, I guess that’s what we could be looking at.

Maybe even more important to Barnes & Noble: brand awareness. Yeah, we’ve obviously all know of Barnes & Noble, but from now on if a college student logs into his or her Blackboard account and sees notes everywhere to the effect of “Need this book? Download it right now on your Nook!” Considering how absolutely ubiquitous Blackboard is, that’s an awful lot of college students who will be within a few mouse clicks of learning more about nook, NOOKstudy, etc.

Will Tablets Be BMOC (Big Machine on Campus) This Fall? - PCWorld

From PCWorld, re: the inevitable replacement of textbooks with eTextbooks. With regard to NOOKstudy, the writer misses the point when he calls it a strategic mistake for B&N to provide that software for Windows and the Mac OS X, since this "actually gives users a reason not to buy" a Nook. Remember, B&N is not in the business of marketing devices. It is in the business of marketing content within its Nook ecosystem. Therefore, B&N has every reason to extend that ecosystem to the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, just as it already has extended a Nook app to the iPad, etc.

Barnes & Noble Introduces NOOKstudy -- Online Reading and Study Platform

Press Release:

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS | PowerRating), the world's largest bookseller, today announced that it has developed an integrated software solution for the higher education market. Called NOOKstudy, the feature rich, free software application is the ultimate study tool, enabling students to manage all their digital content -- eTextbooks, class materials, and notes -- on the computing device they rely on most, their PC or Mac. NOOKstudy, developed with input from students and leading higher education institutions, delivers a superior digital reading experience and is the first digital textbook application that enhances the academic experience through unique and customizable study features. ...

Very smart. Software-driven rather than device-driven approach. Also note that B&N, via its college textbook/wholesale division (founded by my late father-in-law, by the way), dominates the college textbook market, bringing a great deal of clout and preemptive penetration to the distribution equation.

Meanwhile, it seems - according to a recent survey - that 50% of U.S. college students plan to acquire an e-reader of some type before the start of the autumn term.