Kindle Textbook Rental service offers huge student savings

by Steven Mostyn - Jul 19 2011, 07:27

Online retailer Amazon has this week extended the appeal of its Kindle electronic reader by offering device-equipped students access to significant savings through a new textbook rental service.

According to Amazon, the Kindle Textbook Rental platform will enable customers to save up to 80 percent off the usual purchase price of textbooks. Specifically, they will only pay for the time they need via customisable rentals that can be stretched from 30 days to 360 days.

Students that require extra time can extend their rental periods incrementally, which can be as little as adding another day—while rented textbooks can also be purchased at any time.

But what about all those handy and helpful reference notes that students often scribble in their physical textbooks, surely Kindle-based notations will be lost when the rental period comes to an end, we hear you ask? Amazon has that covered too.

“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,” outlined Amazon Kindle vice president Dave Limp in an official statement.

“If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced,” he added.

Tens of thousands of textbooks for the 2011 school year are already available and the service is supported by publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, and Taylor & Francis.

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