AMAZON'S NEW KINDLE TEXTBOOK RENTAL PROGRAMBusiness Insider's Ellis Hamburger has a tabloid-type headline about Amazon wanting to kill bookstores all over again. The earlier Google title for the page merely says,
"Amazon's New Kindle Textbook Rentals Will Save Students A TON Of Money."
That last part seems true. You can see the details at the Amazon page for the Kindle Textbook Rental page, which is headlined "Save up to 80%..." and then explains that this would be "off the list price of the print textbook."
TIME.com considers this "Good News, Students..."
How Renting Works
The shorter the rental, the less it costs. The minimum-length rental is typically 30 days, and with that the savings are 80% off the list price.
After that you pay for added days, and the Amazon page provides a calculator-box that shows you how much it would be for a date-range. The maximum number of days is 360.
Students can also choose to purchase the book they're renting at any time.
"Read Once, Read Everywhere" - The textbooks can be read on Kindle reading apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android device, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry or, of course, on a Kindle.
Amazon adds that "Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis."
Annotations stay accessible - normally lost when a rented book is returned.
' "We've done a little something extra we think students will enjoy," continued [Dave Limp, vice president, Amazon Kindle]. "Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying.
We're extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere - even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced." '
UPDATE
Here's the page for Finding textbooks, which I left off yesterday but which is in tiny print on the Textbook Rental information page.
I tried by entering 'chemistry' to see what they had. The search results included hardcovers and paperbacks; however, they also have "Format" at the top left and you can choose "Kindle edition" -- which gives you books about types of chemistry you probably wouldn't have in mind. But turn the page and there'll tend to be more relevant results
I had MUCH BETTER RESULTS by typing "chemistry textbooks" (it seems to me they should have search logic for 'textbook' in a textbook search but they don't, maybe because not all textbooks are identified with that key word (I don't know).
A good feature, by the way, in case you're assigned several textbooks, is the ability to enter at one time, one or more ISBN numbers, with dashes removed and ISBN numbers separated by a comma, space, or Return.
For daily free ebooks, check the following links:
| Temporarily-free books - Non-classics - USA: by: NEW: May June July 2011 Publication Date Late-listed Bestselling High-ratings UK: PubDate Popular What is 3G? and "WiFi"? Battery Care Highly-rated under $1, | Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK): Top 100 free UK-Only: Top 100 free USEFUL for your Kindle (U.S. only, currently): 99c Notepad 1.1, 99c Calculator, 99c Calendar, |
Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's) K3 Special ($114) K3-3G Special ($139) DX Graphite
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