Online retailer, Amazon, has just launched a brand new service which allows students to rent electronic versions of their textbooks via the Kindle app.
Amazon estimates that hiring e-textbooks will save students as much as 80% as opposed to buying the hard copy. E-book can be hired from 30 days to 360 days and anything in between, plus rentals can be extended at any point during the hire period in one day increments. Students also have the opportunity to buy a hard copy of the text book they have hired on e-textbook form at any time.
Another handy feature of the e-textbook rentals is that any notes or areas which the student highlights on your textbooks will be stored by Kindle, even after the rental period has expired. This means that if you need to re-hire the electronic textbook, maybe for revision purposes, your personal notes will still be in place. The e-textbook notes are stored in Amazon cloud, however the amount of annotations allowed per book varies from publisher to publisher, according to Amazon.
The electronic textbooks will be available to download onto Amazon’s e-reader, PC’s, iOS devices, and all android phones and tablets and any device which can download Kindle apps. At present, the electronic book rental service is only available on text book and not general interest reading.
