Information Madness

It was announced by Amazon today that they are launching the `Kindle Textbook Rental’ that will allow the students to save as much as even eighty per cent on the retail prices of textbooks by enabling them to rent as eBooks from the Kindle Store instead of purchasing them on an outright basis. It is going to work like a library. You will have to pay only a charge for borrowing the textbooks from Kindle.

As an example of the possible cost savings, we can take a book like the `Handbook of Journalism Studies’ that has a hardback list price of $265. The Kindle paperback edition is priced at $64 and the proposed textbook rental will be $30 for 30 days or a dollar a day. Amazon’s new interface for the feature will include a calendar pop-up that will show the rental price depending on the rental time limit that you opt for.

Amazon feels that there are thousands of textbooks that are available for this schooling year from publishers like John Wiley & Sons and Elsevier. Students will have to select rental tenure between 30 and 360 days and pay only for the time slot that they need the textbooks for. You can extend your rental in time periods as specific as a single day even or convert a rental to a purchase at a discounted rate. Students can continue to access notes or highlights even when the rental period is over by visiting Amazon’s website.

This is great news for students who felt that the textbooks were getting to be pricey. They have been seeking ways to grab discounts for their textbooks.