Online retail giant Amazon.com is the new BFF to cash-strapped but otherwise connected college students everywhere.
Gone – or at least mitigated – are the days when college text books break the bank. Now, Amazon.com is making available new Kindle Textbook Rentals so that students can begin saving up to 80% off textbook list prices via rentals in the Kindle Store.
Kindle Textbooks are “Rent Once, Read Everywhere” as they can be read across the most popular devices with free Kindle Reading Apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices.
“Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis,” Amazon says in its announcement.
“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% off the print list price on a 30-day rental,” says Dave Limp, vice president of Amazon Kindle.
Kindle Textbook Rental offers the ability to customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days, so students only pay for the specific amount of time they need a book. Students can also easily extend any rental period in increments as small as one day or choose to purchase the book they are renting at any time.
“We’ve done a little something extra we think students will enjoy,” adds Limp. “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. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”
