Barnes & Noble College Bookstores Teams Up With WizeUp Digital Textbooks To Offer Students New E-Learning Tools

March 2, 2001

NEW YORK, NY — Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, Inc. and WizeUp Digital Textbooks announced plans to expand their relationship and marketing initiatives to accelerate the growth of e-learning in higher education. Together, they will offer students new e-learning tools for distance learning, online training, and interactive classroom applications.

“Colleges and universities around the country are dramatically increasing their online activities and other innovative applications of technology in the classroom,” said David Gray, chief executive officer of WizeUp Digital Textbooks. “Digital textbooks and other digital content that utilizes the Internet and the power of technology will be critical in supporting new educational models for e-learning. We look forward to expanding our relationship with Barnes & Noble College Bookstores and demonstrating to the educational community the unique benefits we offer.”

“We believe that digital delivery of academic content will continue to grow in the next few years and our e-learning initiatives, including our partnership with WizeUp Digital Textbooks, places Barnes & Noble College Bookstores at the forefront of this evolution,” said Jade Roth, vice president, Barnes & Noble College Bookstores. “Student reaction this past semester to WizeUp products was positive and speaks volumes about the exciting future of this technology.”

One of the largest and most innovative retailers in the educational marketplace, Barnes & Noble College Bookstores operates nearly 400 bookstores at colleges and universities around the country. WizeUp Digital Textbooks is the leading developer of digital educational content for the higher education marketplace including digital textbooks, study guides, and other digital ancillary materials.

Barnes & Noble College Bookstores will actively market WizeUp Digital Textbooks at many of the colleges and universities it serves through both in-store and cyber-store promotions. The promotions include sampling of collateral materials, displays, product placement, promotional shelf-talkers and other co-branded signage, Internet marketing, and seamless e-commerce integration between the two companies for specific university class programs.

WizeUp Digital Textbooks produces digital editions of some of the largest and most prestigious college textbooks that professors use in classrooms around the country every day. Applying its advanced e-publishing technology to the printed textbook, WizeUp has been able to establish partnerships with virtually every major publisher in higher education including Pearson Education, Thomson Learning, Harcourt College Publishers, McGraw Hill, among others.

WizeUp follows the printed textbooks page-by-page, graphic-by-graphic, but provides students with technological features such as a powerful search tool, electronic note taking, a digital highlighter, bookmarking for creating custom hyperlinks, and additional multimedia enhancements and capabilities. WizeUp produces textbooks across virtually every major discipline including liberal arts, sciences, and business.

About WizeUp

Based in New York City, WizeUp Digital Textbooks (http://www.wizeup.com) is the leading developer of digital educational content — including digital textbooks, training materials, and other related educational content — for both the higher education and corporate marketplaces. The company is dedicated to serving the educational community with innovative new e-learning solutions.

About Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, Inc.

Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, Inc. — a privately-held sister company to Barnes & Noble, Inc., the nation’s largest bookseller — operates college bookstores at nearly 400 institutions of higher education including Columbia University, California State at Los Angeles, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania, Nassau Community College, Johns Hopkins, C. W. Post, University of Chicago, the Coops at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.