Students can now rent Kindle textbooks from Amazon
Amazon has announced a new program allowing students to rent textbooks.
“Kindle Textbook Rental is a flexible and affordable way to read textbooks. You can rent for the minimum length, typically 30 days, and save up to 80% off the print list price. If you find you need your textbook longer, you can extend your rental by as little as 1 day as many times as you want and just pay for the added days.”
Amazon’s typically sells its kindle textbooks for nearly the same as the hardcopy ones, so renting a textbook may be attractive. We’ve not yet seen any Computer Science or Computer Engineering kindle books for rent, so can’t say how much of a discount there is if you rent for a semester.
By the way, the format that Kindle uses is based on Mobipocket, which is based on HTML. There are some good open source systems that you can use to create kindle-compatible documents from various sources.
Posted: July 19, 2011, 9:28 AM