The popular online retailer, Amazon, today launched textbook rentals for the upcoming Fall semester that hopes to put a serious dent in current textbook prices. As many of you know, textbooks are almost always sold by the college itself, but at much higher prices than you can find elsewhere.Sometimes you only save $10 or $20, but other times you can save over $100 per textbook, which is a significant savings for any cash-strapped college student.
Amazon claimed in a statement that they will begin to offer textbooks from John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. The neat thing about these rentals are that they will be delivered on the Amazon Kindle (an electronic reader), and students will only have to pay for the time they are using them.
Additionally, students can rent a digital textbook on a per-month or per-year basis, giving them flexibility for those longer two-semester courses. No word on what kind of prices you can expect, and I’m sure there will be a lot of variance between course study, but I expect the service will save college students enough to buy a Kindle in the first place.
For Amazon, they’ll be able to meet their Kindle sales quota, so I guess that’s a good thing. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed digital copies of textbooks when it came to reading them on a laptop or a desktop computer, but have never tested them out on a tablet.....
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