Before you spend money on a time-sensitive e-textbook rental from Barnes & Noble’s new NOOKstudy application, take a look through the complaints that have popped up in the past few days on the bookseller’s customer forum. Several threads exist where students are complaining that their rentals aren’t coming through, but it seems B&N’s tech support was away for the weekend because there’s been no official response yet.

Our tipster Adam writes:

I’ve been attempting for 36 hours to download a trial of this particular political science textbook so I can then pay for a fixed 180-day rental, but the trial download conks out at 120000KB with a “We’re experiencing technical difficulties” message, and no further troubleshooting information. B&N hasn’t come forth to acknowledge any actual technical difficulties, and it appears this error is occurring with more than just the text I’m trying to summon. From the sounds of it, customers have actually paid for the rental of books and also wound up unable to download. Not sure how well B&N is resolving those problems.

NOOKstudy was released only a month ago, and early responses ranged from calling it the best textbook platform on the market to saying it felt half-baked and rushed.

Until B&N fixes the problem, a customer named gsfrog33 reported success by going into the “my ebooks library” on bn.com and deleting any free preview books that were included by default.

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