 "Photo: Courtesy Barnes & Noble Booksellers")
This school year, UCF faculty and students have a new way to get the most out of their textbooks.
The UCF Bookstore and Barnes & Noble have partnered with CourseSmart to offer a new e-textbook program, making UCF the first university in Florida to offer a solution that combines textbooks, articles and the ability to add notes digitally for both students and faculty.
"Coursework can be organized into folders, books can be highlighted, annotated, tagged and searched, and multiple materials can be read at once," said Katie Byrne, program manager for the Barnes & Noble Campus Ambassador program.
CourseSmart, the world's largest digital course materials provider, will allow faculty to engage in a Faculty Instant Access program, free, immediate, online access to the most popular textbooks available in North American higher education.
Other universities that have the program include: Arizona State University, Auburn University, Texas A&M University and the University of Tennessee.
"Faculty review and selection of textbooks can be a time-consuming and laborious process," said Joel Hartman, UCF's vice provost for Information Technologies and Resources. "CourseSmart Faculty Instant Access promises to provide our faculty with online tools to quickly and easily find and review texts across a wide range of disciplines."
Byrne said students are able to access the e-textbook program through Barnes & Noble's textbook reader application, NOOKstudy, which is compatible with PCs and Macs.
NOOKstudy is free for UCF students to download and no extra equipment is required for use. Many of the e-textbook's available can be purchased online or at the bookstore.
"NOOKstudy allows students to combine all their course materials into one place," said Byrne, who believes the ability to tag, highlight and take notes within an e-textbook will serve as one of the many benefits to faculty and students.
Junior elementary education major Yanique Vaughn said e-textbooks are a good idea because more people are using their computers and phones to take notes instead of carrying books around.
Vaughn also likes e-textbooks for financial and convenience reasons.
"It is cheaper, and renting books give you more days to try out the book and see if you are going to actually need it in class," she said.
Other students favor renting their textbooks because they can highlight and take notes in their rented books, as long as the textbook is returned to the bookstore within 10 days after the end of final exam period.
"I have become a new fan of textbook rentals because I pay less," senior sports management major Erica Wilkerson said. "I don't understand why I would buy a book and not get the full amount back or can't even return it."
NOOKstudy is available by download from the textbooks link on the bookstore's website at ucf.bncollege.com.
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