The big news this week was Apple taking a big step into the eduction sector by releasing a new updated version of iBooks that supports interactive digital textbooks on the iPad.

Apple also introduced iBooks Author, a new app for Mac for creating and publishing those fancy new digital textbooks, along with cookbooks, picture books, and other interactive books.

Filed under: Apple iPad | Tags: etextbooks, ibooks | 1 Comment »

Plastic Logic finally managed to get an electronic reader onto the market—in Russia. It’s called the Plastic Logic 100. It is designed specifically for the education sector, with the aim of being a textbook replacement device.

It has a roomy 10.7-inch screen and uses the same plastic-based epaper technology that Plastic Logic’s first ereader was supposed to use, the Que Pro Reader, that was cancelled before orders ever shipped—the high price and iPad killed it before it was ever released—and then Plastic Logic had to move to Russia to stay afloat.

Filed under: New eBook Readers | Tags: etextbooks, plastic logic | 5 Comments »

Below is a list of discount codes from Kobo, eBooks.com, eHarlequin, CengageBrain.com, and CourseSmart for savings on various ebooks and textbooks.

As usual, some publishers don’t allow discounting on their ebooks so the codes won’t work for all titles. These include Random House: Imprints Ballantine, Bantam, Broadway Books, Crown, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf; Penguin: Imprints Dorling Kindersley, Alpha, Pearson; Time Warner: Imprints Grand Central, Hachette, Little Brown, Warner; Harper Collins: Imprints Hyperion, Zondervan; and Simon & Schuster.

Filed under: Sales and Discounts | Tags: ebook sales, etextbooks | 7 Comments »

Today Amazon announced the launch of their new Kindle Textbook Rental service, where students can rent textbooks to read on Kindle apps and Kindle devices.

The Kindle Textbook Rental service allows students to choose exactly how long they want to rent a textbook, anywhere from 30 days to 1 year. And students can choose to extend the term of a rental in increments as little as one day, and can also choose to buy the textbook at any time.

Filed under: Amazon Kindle | Tags: etextbooks | No Comments »

A couple of quick savings updates, here’s a coupon code for 5% off eTextbooks at CourseSmart.com: JFXYSAA. The code is valid until June 1st, 2011.

Secondly, Kobo is running a spin and win contest until the end of the day on March 20th. You can win a 10% – 50% off coupon, a $25 eGift card, or a new Kobo Wireless eReader. There’s also a Grand Prize Fairmont Destination Vacation Package valued at $5000.

You can play once per day for a chance to win, and you’re going to get a coupon code for at least 10% off each time so it’s worth the trouble.

Visit Kobo’s contest page to enter and play. You have to be a resident of the United States, Canada, or Great Britain to enter.

Filed under: eBooks, Sales and Discounts | Tags: etextbooks, kobo | No Comments »

As we have all come to realize, the “tablet” is a hot commodity that many different companies are trying to get their hands in. Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Google are just a few of the major companies competing against each other in the mobile computing device market. However, there is one company that, despite its advertising promises, is planning to duck out of hardware manufacturing all together.
 
Silicon Valley has had the Kno Student Tablet in the works for some time. This handy device was specifically geared towards students and their educational needs. In fact, the Kno has gone so far as to network and collaborate with various educational institutions to discover the diverse necessities of the average student. Using this knowledge, the Kno was ready to be a “seamless package” for the consumer.
 

Filed under: News, Tablets | Tags: etextbooks, kno | No Comments »

Kobo Books has added 175,000 PDFs to their ebook library from more than 2,000 publishers, including Prentice-Hall, McGraw-Hill, Blackwell, Palgrave, The World Bank, Springer, Financial Times Press, Routledge, and others.

The PDFs include medical texts, academic and scientific texts, dictionaries, economics and business manuals, technical manuals, and other education oriented materials.

Filed under: eBooks, Kobo | Tags: etextbooks, PDF | No Comments »

Back on August 3rd, just in time for back to school, Barnes and Noble released their new free textbook software called NOOKstudy.

NOOKstudy is designed for college students so that they can manage all their digital content on a PC or Mac computer in one place—eTextbooks, notes, syllabi, books, presentations, classwork, etc.

Some features of NOOKstudy include instant access to B&N’s large library of eTextbooks from major publishers, free 7-day trial for eTextbooks, it can open multiple eTextbooks at once and view two at the same time, add notes and highlights, search, research online, change font type and size, and easily import other PDF and EPUB documents and ebooks into the program to centralize all content in one place.

Overall, NOOKstudy is a pretty decent app, even for just reading ebooks. The notes and highlight features work well and there are plenty of options for changing font size and type, zooming in, and being able to view the eTextbooks in color is a major positive over monochrome E Ink ebook readers like the Nook and Kindle.

NOOKstudy: Getting Started

After downloading NOOKstudy and installing it, you have to either start a Barnes and Noble and Adobe account or sign in with your existing accounts. The Adobe account is needed because the eTextbooks and ebooks have Adobe DRM. This is the most annoying part of the whole process, not being able to test the program without starting a B&N account that requires a credit card number. But once that’s finished, the program is good to go.

If you already have a B&N account, all your EPUB and PDF ebooks will sync with the program and will appear in the library. If not, it’s time to import or download some free ebooks and/or some free samples of eTextbooks.

Unfortunately, the app does not have a shopping app built-in. Clicking on the “Shop” icon brings up a search box that will open a browser and re-direct to B&N.com. Once you choose a title to download, you will then need to click on the sync button within the NOOKstudy app to show the title you selected.

Important: If you are going to be away from the internet, make sure the titles are downloaded. Just because they appear in the library list doesn’t mean they are downloaded to your computer. You have to click on them and wait for the green bar to show that it is finished downloading.

NOOKstudy Videos

Here’s a custom YouTube video player that has all of B&N’s NOOKstudy videos in one place. Just click the arrows or the weird looking icon next to the play button to choose from the other videos.

NOOKstudy Feature List

• Dual Book View: Open two textbooks side-by-side.
• There are tabs so that you can have a number of books open at once and quickly jump from one to another.
• 1 and 2 page views.
• Table of contents.
• Zoom from 25% – 200% in increments of 25, view actual page size, fit to width, and fit page for PDFs, textbooks.
• 4 font sizes for ebooks.
• 6 font types for ebooks: Amasis, Ascender Sans, Century Schoolbook, Gill Sans, Joanna, and Times New Roman.
• Jump to page.
• Run searches.
• Add notes and highlights.
• Tag notes.
• Multiple options for highlight colors and mark highlights with questions and asterisks.
• Right-click to research online with Dictionary.com, Google, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and YouTube.
• Print and copy are allowed on some books. Textbooks have limits on printing.

NOOKstudy for eTextbooks

Reading the FAQ for eTextbooks, there are a few things to be aware of:

• Read eTextbooks on up to 2 computers.
• Free 7 day trial for most digital textbooks, which includes the full book.
• Once a Textbook is downloaded, you don’t have to be online to access it.
• Textbooks must be accessed with the NOOKstudy app. They are not available for online viewing or with other programs.
• Publishers restrict the number of times a textbook can be printed or copied (this varies from title to title). B&N lists each book’s restrictions on the product details page and within the NOOKstudy application.
• eTextbooks do not include CD content or other companion materials that may be available with the new physical book.
• Textbooks available to US and Canadian residents only.

Conclusion

While I’m not a college student and can’t give the app the full eTextbook perspective (for those that are, please feel free to leave comments), I’d say that compared to other e-reading apps, the NOOKstudy app is pretty impressive, offering some nice advanced features and easy to use interface with access to a wide range of digital textbooks.

But it could still be a lot better. Format support is limited to PDF and EPUB. Why no Text and Word documents, at least? There’s no built-in reference, not even a dictionary, those features all require internet. Changing themes like background color and text color aren’t available, there’s no in-app brightness adjuster, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to export notes—they are saved in the B&N cloud. Future updates may add these and more features, but for now the app is somewhat limited.

Filed under: Nook, Reviews | Tags: apps, BN, digital textbooks, etextbooks, nookstudy | 9 Comments »

Barnes and Noble’s pursuit of the higher education market continues to move forward as they’ve partnered with Blackboard to make it easier for millions college students to access interactive e-textbooks as part of their online courses.

The partnership between the two companies will give students more options for digital learning material through the Blackboard Learn program as well as the newly-announced NOOKstudy platform, creating greater interoperability between the two.

“This partnership will make it much easier for students to access the resources they need for their courses and leverage the best in interactive, digital content,” said Matthew Small, Chief Business Officer at Blackboard. “This is part of our overall strategy to transform the way that students and instructors use and share digital content.”

More key information from the press release:

Under the partnership, the companies will work to enable students to access and purchase e-textbooks and other course related materials directly in Blackboard Learn™, the leading Web-based teaching and learning platform. The effort will help streamline the ability for instructors to assign content from Barnes & Noble’s vast catalog of over one million titles, including e-books, e-textbooks, relevant study aids, test prep guides, periodicals, and hundreds of thousands of trade and professional titles.

The integration is expected to be available to Blackboard clients later in the year as a Blackboard Building Block™ for institutions running Blackboard Learn Release 8 and higher. As part of the partnership, Barnes & Noble becomes a Blackboard Premier Partner™ in the Blackboard Alliance Program™. The announcement was made at BbWorld®, Blackboard’s annual user conference held in Orlando, Florida.

Filed under: News | Tags: BN, etextbooks | 2 Comments »

Digital textbooks are becoming more popular with students and universities as paper textbooks cost more and can be cumbersome to carry around everywhere. Below is a list of free textbook websites and digital textbook retailers. Also, make sure to check this earlier post about getting free ebooks from libraries, since there are a lot of options for downloading digital textbooks from schools and universities.

Where to Buy Digital Textbooks

eBooks.com sells more than just fiction. They offer academic ebooks from all the world’s leading scholarly and academic book publishers and have over 50,000 titles to choose from in a wide variety of academic disciplines.

CengageBrain.com, formally iChapters, is one of the world’s largest providers of tailored learning solutions. They offer a wide selection of print and digital textbooks. They also sell “eChapters” if you don’t need an entire ebook, and even rent out textbooks. CengageBrain has some audiobooks as well.

Textbooks.com has over 10,000 eTexts available on their site. They also buy and sell used textbooks. Formats: PDF, works with Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe Reader 7.1 (allows text-to-speech), and VitalSource Bookshelf Reader.

CourseSmart has over 6,000 college textbooks from 14 leading textbook publishers. According to the website, the average price of an etextbook is $60 less than the printed version, and students can annotate, highlight, and run searches within the textbook. The website is setup for Instructors and Students. Instructors can go online to research and compare textbooks and course materials to determine the best options for their students. Formats: Requires CourseSmart Bookshelf software for your computer. There are two forms of eTextbooks: an online version and a downloadable version. Also works with iPhone and iPod touch.

Zinio provides service for publishers to offer digital content through its multi-channel content network. Zinio provides over 1500 magazines from more than 350 publishers. They also offer digital Textbooks and non-fiction ebooks and guides. And they have several international sites. Formats: Requires Zinio Reader software for your computer. Content is available in both online and offline modes. They have an app for iPhone and iPad.

Free Digital Textbooks

FreeTechBooks.com has been online since 2003 and specializes in free computer science and mathematics ebooks. They also have free tech books like computer programming and engineering, physics, marketing, business etc. Most books’ contents you can view online or generally download in HTML and PDF formats.

BookBoon is an online publisher of free textbooks, travel books, and business ebooks. Textbooks are in PDF format and are written exclusively for Bookboon.com by university professors and lecturers. The books have relevant advertisements on every third page on average. They also have an app for downloading the books directly from facebook.

OnlineComputerBooks.com has a wide range of free technology ebooks in science, math, computer programming, etc . . . This site also has links to free trade magazine subscriptions and technical document downloads, as well as other types of free ebooks.

Wikibooks is an open-content collection of textbooks that anyone can edit and contribute to. There are currently over 2400 etextbooks covering dozens of subjects.

Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free textbooks. They provide links to free online etextbooks and other educational materials.

Filed under: eBooks, Free eBooks | Tags: academic ebooks, digital textbooks, etextbooks, free, textbooks | 7 Comments »