Amounts spent by students on textbooks is astronomical and need has given rise to solutions like books on rent, second-hand books etc. There is one more solution on the horizon and it is being offered by Amazon.
Amazon is now allowing students to rent textbooks on the Kindle e-reader and Amazon’s e-reader application for other devices. The Kindle Textbook Rental will allow students to save upto 80% on textbook list prices for a 30 day rental. For example, an accounting textbook which costs $109.20 to buy the actual book, but starts at $38.29 to rent the textbook.
According to Amazon students can rent the books for periods between 30 to 360 days after which access to the book is locked. Students can extend the rental time if they need more time to use the textbook.
The company says that “tens of thousands of textbooks” are available for the 2011 school year from publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.
Amazon has also extended their Whispersync technology to their textbooks, which means that highlighted portions of the textbook and/or notes written during the course of the rental will remain open and available to the student on Amazon Cloud, even after the rental has expired. The note can be automatically synced if you re-rent a textbook. The amount of storable highlighting allowed is determined by the individual publishers, according to an Amazon spokesperson.
Setting aside convenience and portability, the biggest attraction of digital textbooks is the cheaper price.
University of Utah pre-med student Rachel Zimmerman once rented a digital version of an American history textbook for her laptop and thought it was much better “to port around than a 20-pound book.” “Students like its ease of accessibility with so many more students carrying the iPad and the Kindle,” she added. “You just press the ‘on’ button and it’s right there in front of you.”
Students will also be allowed to purchase the textbook if they decide to, and they will also be able to extend their rental periods by even one day if required.
The Kindle Textbook Rental will be available on a variety of platforms, and users can download free Kindle Reading Apps for the PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices.
It remains to be seen whether Amazon’s action is likely to affect textbook rental giants Chegg and BookRenter, which both allow students to rent hardcover and paperback textbooks at low prices. Chegg has an e-book option that could be competitive to Amazon’s new service.
There are other startups like Kno and Inkling who are also trying their hand at the digital textbook arena.
For more information on the Kindle Textbook Rental, you can head to the Amazon website.