NOOKstudy review

[heesey1010]

Edit reason: Changed review completely because I agree that I shouldnt've linked to my blog; I simply thought it would be too long of a post if I posted the entire thing

So you know I’ve been pleading and begging for a decent eBook reader that can finally catapult all of us college students into the cheap yet pleasant era of eTextbooks, right? I got really excited when the iPad came out…only to find out that not a single major textbook publisher was on board (and with a big school like UF, and the classes I’m taking, big publishers are key). The Kindle and Nook can’t do much, because of their black and white screens (most of my textbooks require some sort of graphics and preferrably in color…after all, in organic it’s hard to differentiate between black and gray).

When Barnes and Noble decided to come out with this program NOOKstudy, however, I thought OMG maybe this is the day publishers wake up and realize that we should go 100% mainstream with digital textbooks, let’s start a revolution, oh em gees. After all, the NOOKstudy can do all sorts of annotations, can download books on the fly, etc. etc. It can even serve as one-stop hub for all your class notes and stuff (you can add PDFs and ePub files to NOOKstudy and put your textbook and files for that course under one folder). While this is all version 1.0 and such, it’s still heading in the right direction, right?

Wrong.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think NOOKstudy is based slightly off the Adobe AIR platform…but it’s weird how I could possibly tell. When you first open up the program (second time for me…program crashed the first time starting up…) you’re greeted with a welcome screen and then ushered immediately into either signing in to your bn.com account or making an account. If you sign up for an account, you’re reminded at the bottom of the pop-up that you are also signing up for an Adobe.com account…which is a little fishy. After all, there really doesn’t seem to be any indication that I NEED an Adobe.com account (an Acrobat.com account would be more understandable…although admittedly I’m not sure if Adobe.com account details = Acrobat.com account details).

Anyway, after signing up you’re presented with, admittedly, a dull, basic, nearly infantile screen.

There are four buttons at the top (left to right): My Library, Currently Reading, Shop, and Add File.

My library simply should be reminiscent of the library that you see in either Nook, Kindle or iBooks…but with a little more detail. It tells you what page you left on and when you last read it. Not really important info, but nice-to-know info. We’ll go over the Currently Reading tab in a little bit, but the Shop tab leaves a LOT to be desired.

At first you might think OH how simple! It’s just like Google. Yeah, that works. For Google. Since when did you not have the option to look for a textbook based on edition, author, etc.? Yes, I know keyword technically encompasses all those things, but it’d be nice if it was clearly laid out there. The most disappointing part? Clicking “search now” simply took me to bn.com and their textbooks page…they don’t even have an eTextbook page ready yet. When I typed in the title of my linear regression book (which I knew they probably wouldn’t have), I was presented with what I expect…for regular textbooks. But it was hard to find whether or not there was actually an eTextbook for it.

I finally decided to get a trial textbook; all eTextbooks come with a 7-day free trial which is very nice. Finding the free trial wasn’t exactly the easiest thing on the book’s page at bn.com, but it was manageable. I clicked Free Trial and, after logging in, it simply said that it was ready on my NOOKstudy page. Little did I realize that I have to click “sync”; the program doesn’t actively/smart sync. The trial textbook is indeed a full version of the textbook, so you can see all 545 pages of “Principles of Microeconomics” before deciding you really want to take the course.

The layout in Reading View is simple…almost too simple. But that’s a good thing; you really don’t want any intrusions while reading your textbook. There are options for zoom, one page/two page view on the bottom and table of contents and my notes on the top right. There is a search function presumably in the software…but for some reason, it wouldn’t activate or even show up when I pressed ctrl + f. Not a good start. Also, those options on the bottom can change from textbook to textbook…for instance, in the User Guide, there is no zoom function but there is a font and font size function (this did not exist in the Microecon book).

What is nice is that there is a “dual book” view…which means I can juxtapose my class notes in PDF form with my eBook should I wish. And it looks fairly nice admittedly

My Notes is cool because (again, if your book allows it) you can see EVERY little thing that you wrote/highlighted in your book in one place. The markup options are extensive and cool; you can change the highlight color and even classify types of highlighting based on “important stuff” (aka asterisk), regular highlighting, or if you need to ask a question to your professor about something that you don’t understand; this all happens when you highlight your text and lay your cursor over the region for a few seconds. You can also copy text (with limitations…I’ll discuss that in a little bit), add actual annotations, or even lookup a concept or word you may not understand via Google. Note annotations and highlighting is definitely noteworthy…but making sure you can search through them later is harder than it seems. If you want to know the contents of what you actually highlighted, you would need to highlight whatever text you wanted and then add a note so you can search for it later; highlighting text doesn’t mean that the program simply grabs the text from what you highlighted.

Like I said before, you can also copy text as well…very nice for when you’re having to explain something to a friend, for instance. There are three limitations though: you can’t copy text from trial textbooks (understandable), but also you can only copy from “enhanced” versions of textbooks (which probably cost a bit more money), and even then you can only copy a “fixed allotment” of characters. The language is kind of confusing on what/how you can copy, so I’ll just quote (not copy…already accidentally used my copy allotment) from the User Guide:

Copying lets you take pages of the book outside the secure NOOKstudy ecosystem. Publishers set limits on how many pages you can copy at a time to protect copyright holders…Copying is allowed only on ONE of your two computers where you read this title…Copying is tracked in ‘copy instances’. A copy instance is worth 1,000 characters (including spaces)…If you choose the Enhanced version, you receive a fixed allotment when you first download your boo,. After you start using your allotment, you accrue pages back.

Kind of confusing, but it’s kind of a shame (yet barely understandable) that copy restrictions are required. A nice little feature though when you copy: when you paste into another document, a citation is already nicely included.

You can also print pages…if the textbook allows you to do so. Again, there are limitations

Quick Verdict

NOOKstudy definitely does more than your run-of-the-mill PDF reader can do in the same situation. Dual-book/file view plus some pretty spiffy annotation tools definitely help advance the cause of electronic reading. But the software is too simplistic, at best, and there’s much more left to be desired. The fact that the Store is not even integrated into the program at all is not just incorrect, it shows the software’s lack of maturity. And even though the User Guide claims there’s a Find function…there isn’t, not even in the User Guide.

There are two things that will determine whether this ecosystem succeeds: the quality of the textbooks and the software that can harness these textbooks. To be fair, the textbook quality is really up to the publishers themselves. If they want to make the textbooks lame with no rich multimedia integration, that’s their problem not the reseller’s. But the software execution needs to be nearly flawless as well. While NOOKstudy shows some potential in separate parts, as a whole it doesn’t come together at all. I wouldn’t be so harsh if it wasn’t advertised as a 1.0 stable version, but it is…and it just feels like a 0.3 beta version (barely).

Grade: D+

[zhangm Supervisor]

Post the entire review here. This isn't a forum to prosthelytize your blog.

[Knife Party]

biggest con yet, who the hell wants to stare at a screen for so many x hours, dear god my eyes they burn... :no:

[heesey1010]

Post the entire review here. This isn't a forum to prosthelytize your blog.

Agreed. I just thought initially at first that the post would be too long if I did the entire review, so I tried to make my pros/cons as comprehensive as possible.

[Bioran]

It'd be useful for me if it wasn't so US-based, with IB textbooks etc. As it stands, there's nothing for me to use for the software.