Blackboard Software Will Incorporate Virtual College Bookstore

The learning-management behemoth Blackboard is getting into the virtual-campus-bookstore business.

This semester the company is testing a system in which a faculty member can visit the new online bookstore to search for and select materials for her course—including new, used, or rental books, e-books, open-source content, material the faculty member wrote herself, and more. When a student visits the bookstore, he’ll find the course materials for all his classes waiting in an online shopping cart...