Amazon unveiled plans today to provide textbooks for rental on Kindle. Kindle owners will be allowed to rent the textbooks for as little as 30 days and as much as a year. Amazon is promising that rentals will boast an 80% discount over actually purchasing the textbook.
David Limp, vice president of Kindle, had this to say about the new offering,
"Students tell us that they enjoy the low prices we offer on new and used print textbooks. Now we're excited to offer students an option to rent Kindle textbooks and only pay for the time they need—with savings up to 80 percent off the print list price on a 30-day rental."
There a couple of neat details to this offering. First, when the rental runs out the user can extend that rental in increments that are as small as one day. That's great for students who need one last day to cram for an exam but will have no use for the book after that point. Books can also be purchased after the rental period is up.
The second really nice feature is that Amazon will leverage their Whispersync technology for this offering. That means all of a user's highlights, and page markers will remain stored in the cloud. If the user needs to rent (or purchase) the book at a later time, all of those virtual marks will still be there.
Just like other Kindle books, the textbooks will work across a range of devices. You can view the textbook on the Kindle app on Android and then pick up where you left off on an iPad, for example. You really don't have to own a Kindle at all to use the service, which is nice, but this might just get students in the door to purchase the device. This rental service might even boost sales of the Kindle DX, Amazon's larger E-reader option which seems well suited to textbook content.
The service should be ready for the fall 2011 school year and will offer textbooks from John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis.
So, why exactly is Amazon bothering with the textbook rental business? It seems like they are trying to get their foot in the door of an industry Barnes and Noble has controlled for a while. B&N owns many on campus book stores and they rent physical copies of textbooks. In addition to that, B&N launched their own version of textbook rental on their Nook last year, coined NookStudy.
Time will tell how successful Amazon will be but the competition in this market could benefit students greatly, especially if the two companies try to best each other on rental prices.
