Amazon Lets Students Rent Digital Textbooks 174
nk497 writes "Amazon has unveiled a new digital textbook rental service, allowing students to choose how long they'd like access to an eBook-version of a textbook via their Kindle or app — with the retailer claiming savings as high as 80%. Kindle Textbook Rental will let students use a text for between 30 and 360 days, adding extra days as they need to. Any notes or highlighted text will be saved via the Amazon Cloud for students to reference after the book is 'returned.' Amazon said tens of thousands of books would be available to rent for the next school year."
Re:what happened to information wants to be free (Score:5, Informative)
Because those corporate whores are the ones who publish the books that hold the information.
If you really want to support the freedom of information, petition your university to use OpenCourseWare [mit.edu].
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
A few is exactly right. As a poor college student I tried to use those, sadly when you have 400 folks taking one class the three copies in the library are not exactly enough.
How about not using a new edition of the book every semester?
Or for something like Chemistry 101/Calculus how about using something in the public domain? Not like either of those fields have really changed in the past 100 years.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
They should choose books that don't charge hundreds per copy. The textbook racket needs to be broken up with kickbacks to instructors or universities strictly called unethical.
Oh, please. This nonsense about kickbacks shows up every time this kind of topic is discussed on slashdot. Could we please have some evidence for these supposed kickbacks? I'm a college professor. I have never been offered a kickback by a publisher. I have never heard of a kickback being offered to any of my colleagues. It doesn't make sense to talk about kickbacks going to the school, either, because it's faculty who make decisions about textbooks, not administrators.
Yes, it would be great to have more books that don't cost the equivalent of their weight in heroin. But guess what? The traditional print publishers don't offer cheap textbooks. Using old books isn't an option, because accrediting bodies will ding you if you're using a book that's more than about 5-10 years. (Those bodies don't care if the subject is one like freshman calc that hasn't changed in a hundred years or more.)
The best thing is if faculty write books and make them free online. I've done that. (See my sig.) What have you done that makes you part of the solution rather than part of the problem?