As of Monday, July 18th, the leading retail giant started renting textbooks to students. Amazon made available tens of thousands of textbooks from its online Kindle Store. According to Amazon, the prices for rental textbooks Amazon “are as much as 80 percent lower than the list prices for the books.” Rental times range from 30 to 360 days for books from publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.
“According to the National Association of College Stores, which represents more than 3,000 college bookstores, over 2,400 of its member stores offered rentals of physical textbooks in January, and nearly all are expected to do so by this fall. Students can also turn to Web-based textbook rental companies such as Chegg.com for physical books, or rent e-textbooks to read on devices such as a laptop or Apple Inc.’s iPad.”
Author Comment
Thoughts? This trend is a pocketbook saver for the financially strapped student. But what of the educational institution who relies on money made form the sale of textbooks as well as the “kickback” from books written by their professors?
College Institutions generate a lot of money from kickbacks on the sales of books. So is moving to the e-reader a good, or a bad thing? The issue, with me, has always been the high cost of college textbooks – way above the market price. So, though the e-reader may carve into some of the university’s cache, I hear a loud sigh of relief and outright cheer from students.
There is also the “green” effect – less waste of used books put into the trash heap. I just hope the tend to e-books doesn’t cause a slow rise in the cost of the books, so the student is no better off than where they started.
Source: USA Today
