Barnes & Noble is clearly aiming some of their eBook efforts at educational use, something that Amazon and the Kindle have failed to do in any serious way. They ramped up efforts today with the release of Nook Study, a computer program that gives you the ability to view and annotate your Nook books, PDFs, and other files that you throw at it from the comfort of your PC or Mac.
The notes syncing, complete with highlights and everything, works beautifully. It remembers your place from book to book no matter where you are viewing it. And although I wasn’t able to test it, it promises to work with Blackboard:
Barnes & Noble has joined with Blackboard to help you seamlessly integrate eTextbooks into Blackboard Learn, the teaching and learning management system you already use.
Not sure exactly what that means, but it could be a huge benefit to colleges & universities that use the Blackboard system and are experimenting with eTextbooks.
It doesn’t do the one thing I’d hoped, which is sync my local documents (PDFs that I’ve added to my local NookStudy at my computer) to my B&N eReader software on my iPad. But overall, it’s an interesting add-on that might help keep the Nook afloat.
