Students buying books for the quarter probably noticed the green “NookStudy” cards lining the shelves. These cardboard slips are the next step in textbook technology: eTextbooks brought to DePaul by Barnes and Noble’s NookStudy application. Launched in August 2010, NookStudy consolidates study materials and eTextbooks into one program.
Barnes and Noble has been selling eTextbooks since 2003, but until NookStudy, “they didn’t really gain traction,” said Jade Roth, Vice President of Digital Strategy at Barnes and Noble College.
The reason: students like to interact with their books. “I like to turn pages,” says Mary Kate, a DePaul student, “when I’m just clicking, nothing sticks.”
“They want to highlight, to make notes,” says Roth, and NookStudy gives students that ability, allowing students to highlight, annotate, and prioritize their research.
NookStudy has its limits, however. Though it has gone through four upgrades in its short lifetime, the application is limited to only Mac and PC computers, and eTextbooks do not come with the supplemental materials often included with textbooks.
The first limitation is not the application, but mobile devices: an eReader comparison chart provided by Borders.com shows that standard eReader screens run between five and seven inches in height (the Nook and Nook Color are about seven inches), too small to fully visualize a graphics-heavy textbook page.
The eReaders also have limited graphics and most read only in black and white, rendering many important illustrations unreadable.
Barnes and Noble College say they are pursuing options for NookStudy, including possibly developing an application for tablet computers like the iPad, but they do not see NookStudy ever becoming available for eReaders.
This may come as a disappointment for students who received eReaders over the holidays and were hoping to use them for study. As for the absence of supplemental materials sometimes included with a regular textbook, the NookStudy homepage cites “the digital delivery format” as the reason those materials cannot be included. This lack of supplemental materials is an unfortunate drawback to the eTextbook, particularly for those students whose coursework include those materials.
For many students, though, the main factor when buying textbooks is price. Seniors Che Goranov and Chris Strew had to buy their books new, and say they “definitely consider” a book’s sellback value important when purchasing; their friend, senior Nestor Nurillo rented his books, a cheaper route, but one that does not allow him to re-sell later.
Other students shop online to get the lowest prices. These eTextbooks claim a tempting price: NookStudy claims you can save up to 60 percent with eTextbooks. That number may reflect the price of a new textbook, but does not take into account used books, or textbook rental.
Linda Beck-Olson, President of Becks Books (a Chicago-based used textbook supplier), has not seen significant eTextbook sales in her company, and feels eTextbooks probably are not here to stay for that reason.
An eTextbook may be half the price of a new textbook, but only a fraction cheaper than a used text-lacking that text’s supplemental materials-and may actually be more expensive than renting the print text.
More importantly, though, “you can’t sell back an eTextbook,” Beck-Olson says, and that is a significant drawback.
Textbooks in any format are expensive, and a book’s ability to be re-sold is important to students. Physical textbooks can be re-sold to put some money back in a student’s pocket; e-textbooks cannot.
With no way to re-sell an eTextbook, students are still looking at a decent amount of money spent each term, without any way to get some of it back in the end.
NookStudy is a strong application, and as it continues to improve it will surely be a valuable tool for DePaul students. But so long as print books are available-and students can get back some of their money when they are finished with them-e-textbooks will probably not be able to claim dominance in the classroom.