Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Amazon offers US students textbook rental

by: Lisa Campbell

Amazon.com is giving students the ability to rent textbooks on Kindle e-readers.


The company said students can save up to 80% off textbook prices with the new initiative, which launched today. Kindle Textbook Rental will also allow students to tailor the time they loan textbooks for, between a 30 and 360-day period and students can choose to buy the book they are renting at any time. Academic publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor and Francis are among those signed up to the textbook rental scheme.

Dave Limp, vice-president at Amazon Kindle, said: “We've done a little something extra we think students will enjoy. Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We're extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere, even after a rental expires."

A spokesperson for Amazon UK said the Kindle Textbook Rental service was restricted to US Kindle users through the Amazon.com website.

from: Bookseller

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