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.