Amazon has launched a new service allowing students to save money by renting textbooks in electronic form. Kindle Textbook Rental allows students to choose from a catalog of tens of thousands of textbooks for their 2011 school year from leading publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis and rent them as e-books for only the period of time required for their course work.
Users can customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days with pricing based on the rental period, offering pricing up to 80% off the list price of the print versions of the same text books. Existing rentals can be easily extended in increments as small as one day simply by paying for the extra days, and users can re-extend their rental as often as necessary or simply pay to convert the rental to a purchased book.
Kindle Textbook Rental uses a “Rent Once, Read Everywhere” model allowing users to access any of their rented textbooks on any Kindle-supported device, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch or on a PC or Mac or other supported smartphone platforms. Amazon has also enhanced its Whispersync technology to preserve notes, annotations and highlighted content in rental textbooks with a user’s Amazon account indefinitely so that if they subsequently rent the same textbook again in the future, all of the annotations will appear as the user left them. The Amazon Kindle app is available from the App Store as a free download.
