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."
Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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OK, so I re-read you
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That hasn't stop math departments from using Rudin's book (which is 35 years old) for intro analysis. And Dover Publications sells great textbooks for under $20 that are just reprinted from decades old classics....
Yet you quoted this part of the parents post:
(Those bodies don't care if the subject is one like freshman calc that hasn't changed in a hundred years or more.)
I guess you're new to this whole "reading" thing.
Even funnier, Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is still overpriced at $100.
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How many free copies? Sounds more like a free sample (here's our book, compare it to the competing ones but we hope you'll select ours) to me than a kickback.
Don't worry, the problem is about to go away... (Score:2)
The biggest problem with textbooks is the fact that they are needlessly revised every year. Creating new editions reduces the usefulness of earlier editions, thus cutting into the used textbook market. I explicitly tell my students "use edition x or newer", rather than insisting on the newest edition. This requires microscopically more work on my side, while saving students massive amounts of money, since they can buy used textbooks. In some courses, I no longer use a textbook at all, as all necessary infor
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Dpends on your field, I think. I still have my old computer programming textbooks from university, but that's more due to nostalgia than anything else. Especially for things like languages that significantly over time (such as java), keeping old books is pointless.
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Dpends on your field, I think. I still have my old computer programming textbooks from university, but that's more due to nostalgia than anything else. Especially for things like languages that significantly over time (such as java), keeping old books is pointless.
Syntax of fast moving targets yes. Concepts, no. Knuth is still good stuff.
Basically old IT books are about as valuable as old IT software and hardware. On the other hand, old CS books are still valuable.
definition of science? (Score:2)
Dpends on your field, I think. I still have my old computer programming textbooks from university, but that's more due to nostalgia than anything else. Especially for things like languages that significantly over time (such as java), keeping old books is pointless.
So true. And it made me wonder. Is a science something in which the text books change slowly not annually? Computer science versus computer enginieering versus computer vocational training? How can it be science or even engineering if the textbooks go obsolete so fast?
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I routinely find myself referencing textbooks from courses that I took years ago. If students cannot afford their books, university libraries should provide copies; students should not be at the mercy of Amazon or any other company.
Amen to that. If I didn't have many of the textbooks from old courses I took, it would almost be as if I never took the course in the first place. I have always thought that in many courses, you aren't merely taking them to fully learn the actual knowledge...you are taking them to learn that the knowledge actually exists in the first place. Later you find that you need the knowledge, or that it is interesting to you, and you go back and re-read the textbooks.
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Didn't you take notes in those courses?
In my first semester I made the error to rely on the text book (well, at least in one course). After that, I wrote complete notes for any course. Which resulted not only in me having the complete material covered in the course without paying anything, but also having it memorized much better than by using the book, because it all went through my brain in order to get into my notes.
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't you take notes in those courses?
In my first semester I made the error to rely on the text book (well, at least in one course). After that, I wrote complete notes for any course. Which resulted not only in me having the complete material covered in the course without paying anything, but also having it memorized much better than by using the book, because it all went through my brain in order to get into my notes.
Did I say I didn't take notes? I often find that in a field that I have continued to study or use, going back to the textbook is more useful than going back to my notes. In fact, I sometimes find that sections of the textbook that were less useful to me when I was learning the material become more useful as a way to solidify and enhance my knowledge. If the material has been digesting in my brain for a few years, the reliable and thorough explanations in a good logical textbook make more sense than they ever did before.
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University libraries likely do, when I taught we put a few copies of the text for the class into the reserve.
Why shouldn't amazon offer an additional service to students?
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.
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Chemistry hasn't changed much in 100 years? What are you smoking and where can I get some?
Even the intro/101 stuff has changed. Not enough for a new edition of a textbook every year, but you could not teach modern chemistry from a 100 year old textbook. Even a 50 year old textbook.
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Has it changed, or the way it's taught? It's been about 25 years since I studied chemistry. I'd been given, several years before that stage, a copy of one of the books that covered the inorganic part. And the person who'd given it to me had used it 15 years before - and it wasn't new when he got it.
Now I haven't read it for some time (it's at my parents' house ... somewhere), but If memory serves me well it refers to Fluorine as a halogen, and if it mentions phlogiston theory at all it's as a passing not
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If you think "discovering a few new elements" is all that has changed in 25 years then you're just not keeping up, but if it's not your field then it may not look like much has changed.
I suppose nothing has changed in computing in the last 25 years. I mean, computers have got a little bit faster, but do we really need a new textbook to tell us that? Just a scratch on the surface.
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How about not using a new edition of the book every semester?
We did this at one time on my campus with our conceptual physics course, which was using Conceptual Physics by Hewitt. The publisher came out with a new edition that had some chapters rearranged and that was only available shrinkwrapped with some junk so that students couldn't return it. We kept on using the old edition. However, this was a difficult solution to sustain in the long term. It required a lot of good will from the person at the bookstore who was in charge of purchasing. She had to go to a lot o
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Old books can count against accreditation, even if it is a basic math textbook.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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I doubt you reference ALL of them. Books relevant to your major/career should probably be bought and kept, but there were dozens of books (each costing $100+) that I have absolutely no use for: math, chemistry, english, history, stat, etc. None of these are relevant to my major/career and I'd opt for a more entertaining book on a rainy day.
Disagree strongly in theory, agree strongly in practice.
The old liberal arts idea was the "great books curriculum" where everyone had a common liberal arts canon of education. Everyone should have read at least Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and probably should own a copy if they're wealthy / cultured enough.
For financial reasons those books have been replaced in the sciences with "C++ in 24 hours for noobs professorial financial kickback edition new for 2011 obsolete in 2012" which invalidates both the com
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Again, you missed the GPs point. Not ALL textbooks are going to be useful. There's a lot of terrible texts out there that don't address topics that are useful for everyday use. They might be interesting to some as an intellectual exercise but textbooks should have some component of use or at least interest.
If you went to school to get training, instead of an education, like a very expensive vo-tech school, then you're not going to like educational subjects. If you graduated but can't stand anything other than your major, you failed those classes, even if thru grade inflation "everyone got an A just for showing up" or whatever.
Most of this countries restaurant meals have been at McDonalds. That doesn't mean the concept of a five star restaurant cannot exist, or that no restaurants make food better than dog f
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You need a book to do that?
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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As a student I didn't really have the cash for these books and always needed to sell them back. So assuming that the cost is significantly cheaper than buying the book it would've suited me to rent them. Then as I got an income (i.e. the job that would use them in) I not only purchased back old text books, having a lot more disposable cash, but I purchased the ones that I used and didn't have the u
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The only downside may be that you can't mark up the book while studying.
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Never really have.
Why bother? The internet is there and has 99% of everything on it. Either the same text, or someone else's or (usually) something much more specific to the problem area you're looking at.
Books.... meh.
Right to read (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org]
Richard Stallman's famous parable about the Right to Read, and what will happen if intellectual monopoly laws continue to grow.
It's amazing how RMS, obstinate as he is, has been so prescient.
The story's about what will happen when we're all converted to electronic books.
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Stallman is only 1/2 right.
Information tends toward freedom, while those that have information want to restrict it so they can monetize it. He is only speaking towards the latter half. IP laws are legitimate under very limited circumstances. However we've long since past any reasonableness in laws pertaining to the tyranny of the content holders.
This is why I've suggested that we start making Open Source Textbooks for use.
And after what I've seen being passed off as textbooks these days, full of Politically
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welcome
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm [mit.edu]
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By that, of course, you're referring to evolution.
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Good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
You sound like a college professor, who has a hard time believing your area of study isn't interesting to all your students.
For most college classes text books are an expensive and near useless expense, Especially for those Undergrad required courses that the student needs the book for the class then never uses it again... Some students never even use the book during class as they learn better by hearing the lectures vs. from reading a book.
Many college books are introduction based books so after they take
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And if you are going to Pay $150.00 for a text book where during the class you have read 3 chapters in it. (50 pages) on a topic that you are not interested in but needed to take the class to graduate.
Hmm. $150 / 50 pages is $3 per page. Can you find a photocopier that charges less than $3 per page? Just sayin.
The "one guy buys it and we all share it" does not scale for multiple readings. The "one guy buys it and we all photocopy it" did scale. You can even illegally sell photocopies of the relevant chapters for perhaps twice the cost of photocopying and everyone still comes out ahead (well, not the greedy publishers, or the kick back powered profs, but no loss there).
Also I had a prof who collected
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I have never heard of a school that had more then a handful of copies for courses with hundreds of students and always very limited time borrowing so unless you are the type to just go to the library and do all your homework in a afternoon then it is useless, and never around when you need them anyways.
And text books are already a huge percentage of school fees, so no school out of the goodness of their hearts are not just going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year keeping the latest edition
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I have yet to find a library that does not have at least one of those machines.
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First off that would be illegal and also quite expensive, cheaper then a new copy but possibly more expensive then renting or buying used and reselling afterwards.
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Well as long as you would not be photocopying everything.
Still not an optimum solution, but all it might would out pretty good for a lot of courses.
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You don't take notes off your textbook?
I've always done that, but with the exception of a professor who wrote the textbook he was using, I've just never taken a course that followed the textbook cover to cover.
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Libraries are meant to provide a collection of knowledge, not a warehouse of books. Most libraries I've been to have been filled up on every floor with copies of *mostly unique* books. Where are they supposed to store hundreds of identical copies for each of hundreds of different classes? And books used as a reference are different than books used as instructional material: the former can be fifty years old, the latter is assumed to be mostly up to date, and the problem sets need to correspond to the lat
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You can photocopy parts of textbooks that you need for a course, if the library has only one copy of a book that hundreds of students need.
My professors have told me that the maximum that's considered "fair use" is about 10%, and that's supposed to be as supplementary material, with the assumption being that there is some other officially assigned textbook for the course. Making photocopies so students can have a course text without buying it is obviously copyright infringement. If you want to promote that, then I don't see why you would suggest people spend hours and lots of money making photocopies when they can usually download the comple
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I routinely find myself referencing textbooks from courses that I took years ago
All of them? Because while the books I took related to my current job may be somewhat useful, I have absolutely no use for my intro to world literature book I bought. Doorstop maybe. And books related to my current job, it's quicker just to google that information than even finding the book itself.
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I routinely find myself questioning if my *static* books are worth shit, these days.
I went to college in the 80's. I can't find a lot that is either still relevant OR still ONLY found in those books. anything there is searchable and greppable online. that's a plus.
dead tree versions collect dust (you can smell the dust when you enter a book-fan's house; you really can) and are a PITA when you have to pack and move. reducing your wallspace needed also makes room for other, more important things that you
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I was going to make a snarky comment that if the dust is collected in the books then it's not in the air, so how can you smell it? But instead I'll just say that I quite like that smell.
I'll concede that.
Bad idea from who? (Score:2)
I routinely find myself referencing textbooks from courses that I took years ago. If students cannot afford their books, university libraries should provide copies; students should not be at the mercy of Amazon or any other company.
I agree with you that Universities SHOULDN'T be gouging their students on book fees, or rather should be providing alternatives to buying new... but how does that actually have anything to do with the service that Amazon claims to be providing? That's like saying Police are a bad idea because criminals just shouldn't be stealing. I mean, well DUH. But that's not happening. Universities aren't providing me copies of textbooks I need, and I am desperate to find ANY way to get these books cheaper than buying t
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I am to the point that I buy what I think I'll need, and ignore the rest, or occasionally will meet up with several other students the first day of class and split the cost of 1 book to share. I fail to see how this is a bad idea.
Believe it or not, a quarter century ago the strategy employed was to photocopy entire books if the publisher tried to charge more per page than the cost per photocopier page. If the prof was part of the kickback, perhaps by being an author, etc, then they got real pissed off. On the other hand if it was the profs' boss who got the kickback, the prof would high-5 you for sticking it to the man. The cost of copying has exploded upward from that 3 cents/page, but then again the price of textbooks has also
Learn and Forget (Score:2)
Don't forget undergrad (Score:2)
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Nice to have the option (Score:3)
Ideally classes should use open source materials (or is that open source source materials? open source^2 materials?) but if they're going to have the whole corrupt commercial textbook system then students ought to have the option to rent rather than buying anything they're not going to keep.
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"students ought to have the option to rent rather than buying anything they're not going to keep."
They do. It's called downloading one copy, breaking the DRM, then spreading it far and wide.
Coerce ME into the textbook racket? Fuck me? No, fuck YOU and have a nice day.
We live in a world where our masters and the elites don't have to obey rules, so why should we obey them for their benefit?
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I'd rather depend on an author whose income depends on quality to produce a comprehensive text than on a collection of unaffiliated authors putting a text together.
False dichotomy. There are also those authors who depend on having a friend who teaches a class who has pledged to use his text, for example.
Also, open source has the tendency to get things to the point where everything is just good enough to keep someone from improving things.
In some cases that would probably produce a superior result. In the cases where it's not broken, I probably wouldn't advocate a fix.
Here come the lawsuits (Score:3)
The textbook publishers are going to throw a FIT. So are the universities, probably, because most of them run for-profit bookstores.
I expect that Amazon is going to be forced to kill this new service within a few months.
The way textbooks are bought and sold and approved is one of the biggest scams in education. But it's hugely profitable. Amazon is going to have a battle on their hands.
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They change editions every year so that the life cycle of a text in the resale market (for which you can only sell back a current version) is amazingly short. They get a huge cut on the first sale, nothing on the second, and by the time the third would happen, there's a new edition. This could reduce the revenue from the first sale, but allow for less need to churn editions to keep the new book sales in the forefront. I'll be interested to see what happens.
I might (I say might) go for this, especially if
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Or universities refusing to play the game.
I had a professors that did that. He used old versions and you had to pay a deposit to get the book, which was exactly what replacing that used copy would cost him. At the end of the class he gave back your money when you returned the book.
I am not suggesting all universities move to a 0 profit from books scenario, but they could move to exclude any book above $X from the undergrad curriculum.
In all fairness... (Score:2)
Artificial scarcity is ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... an unfortunate business model for the 21st century and all our tools of abundance... http://www.artificialscarcity.com/ [artificialscarcity.com]
Which is it? (Score:2)
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.
Then immediately after.
If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.
Well, which is it? These seem to be mutually exclusive conditions. Either you can access your notes "anytime, anywhere" when your rental has expired or you can only access them after you have given them more money again.
Some universities already rent text books. (Score:2)
My wife went to the University of Wisconsin Eau Clair and they rented text books there. I would assume that there are other universities that do the same as well. There was also the option to purchase the book if you wanted it.
As many have noted I did keep some of my text books, but they were mostly the more advanced ones like the ones for my compilers, algorithms, computer simulation (offered through the physics department), AI, and robotics courses. Granted these were mostly theory books and had lots of
This makes too much sense.... (Score:2)
Questia (Score:3)
This is not too different than what Questia [questia.com] has been doing for years. I'm sure Amazon's service is more polished and integrates better with their reader, but this concept isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.
We're essentially talking about an online library for a premium.
An "always updated" textbook (Score:2)
I have copies of a number of textbooks from my degree - although some I've ditched. However, given how fast my particular subject - and many others - moves, I could be quite happy "renting" a textbook, where I always had access to the latest version. I don't need to buy / store every copy of a book, but to have access to the latest copy - in digital form - when I needed it, would be something I'd pay for.
With virtually zero cost of reproduction, and an ongoing payment stream to authors (and their publis
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With virtually zero cost of reproduction, and an ongoing payment stream to authors (and their publishers etc.), I wonder if this could be a viable model.
I think you pretty much just described Oreilly's Safari service. Was a customer mid-last decade, liked it, but didn't use it enough to justify the cost. You'd think they'd prefer half the revenue at half the price from a very light user, to none of the revenue at full price, but ... Anyway, is Safari still around?
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Do they really update the digital copy on the fly though? Somehow I find that unlikely. I suspect that the edition coincides with the print edition and does not change throughout the year.
I hadn't even thought about on-the-fly updating, to be honest - I was happy enough with a change with print edition, although, since that is largely predicated on the need for printed publication deadlines and the like, it would seem to be maintaining an old tradition for the sake of it.
But, as long as it remained a
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I agree, its artificial scarcity and thus considered harmful. As for subscriptions for the latest versions -- If keeping an archived copy of the current / past versions is not allowed you can count me out of subscription based & DRM enabled information access. If I paid to access version 1.5, then my local copy does not need to disappear when version 2.0 is available.
I still have some of my old programming books even though C has changed a lot since then. Can you guess why I still have those old b
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If I paid to access version 1.5, then my local copy does not need to disappear when version 2.0 is available.
Same - and why need it? Having access to any version of a textbook - including previous and future editions... I enjoy reading old law texts, to see how the law was interpreted at the time.
Heck, this is my dream - it's easily modified as and when people contribute good ideas :)
No. Just No. (Score:2)
Rent.
Digital.
Choose one.
How about a print copy with digital copy (Score:2)
What will really happen (Score:2)
math and diagrams; shopping for classes (Score:3)
Kindle has poor support for equations, so this is a non-starter in science, technology, engineering, and math. Amazon's page prominently shows a chem book with a big, color diagram of a molecule. But what the heck are they going to do when that chem book needs to show an equation? My understanding is that support for equations is currently extremely crude; Kindle's .azw format is mobipocket format with a layer of DRM. Mobipocket is zipped html, with no support for mathml, and images placed at the center of the page. In html I can use superscripts and subscripts to fake a certain amount of inline math, but anything beyond very basic equations is going to have to be shown as a bitmapped image standing at the center of the page on a line by itself. That just isn't how books with mathematical content are normally formatted. What about detailed diagrams like graphs or blueprints? Are these really legible on a kindle?
One thing that I can see that could be advantageous about this is that it could help to smooth out the shopping-for-classes period that happens at the beginning of every college term. The way this currently works is incredibly inefficient. Students stand in long lines at the bookstore, which typically pays for overtime and temporary student workers during that period. Students buy books for a class, drop the class, stand in line some more at the bookstore, and return the book. The bookstore either has to intentionally understock the book (meaning that some students won't be able to get a copy during the first couple of weeks) or else buy enough for every student, which means that after the shopping period is over, they'll have to return some to the publisher, paying for shipping. All of this creates lots of extra costs for the bookstore and/or publisher, which they pass on to students. It would be great if students could rent their books for the first couple of weeks, then buy once they're sure they're going to keep the course.
Personally, I have no intention of buying an ebook reader until there is a big, established market of DRM-free titles. When you buy a DRM'd book, you have to anticipate that it won't be readable in 5 years.
Rent a textbook?!? (Score:2)
Jeez, I hope I can get a discount for buying last-year's second-hand eTexts...
Could be nice, depending on how it's implemented. (Score:2)
Sounds nice. (Score:2)
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].
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Most libraries have maximum loan times of 3 weeks and then you have to bring them back. Sometimes they let you (automatically) renew the book, but if somebody has it reserved, you often don't have that option. Libraries would not give you the option of keeping a text book for the entire semester.
How long does it take you to run off a couple photocopies? Used to be a stereotypical "early morning hangover" activity in the early 90s.
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And if it is actually around 80% cheaper then buying new then that is better then buying used and reselling.
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I'm surprised that kids these days are having to haul a lot of books around. When I was in high school, I only took books home at all maybe two or three times a week, and never more than one or two. And we didn't even have study hall back then. If I couldn't finish my homework in class, I would take my book to the next class and if I got done with that classes homework, I would work on my other classes homework. Nowaday
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Even when you have conditional access to a digital service it's not RENTING.
Why should archived copies of the past versions disappear, or access to the stored current version end when your subscription does?
For any information, (esp on subjects truly important to my life, like computer programming languages), I will not pay for any information or "info service" that has DRM that enables "renting".
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there is no reason that you can't re-rent the book for the minimum 30 days again in the future
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_print_books [wikipedia.org]
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Unless they are DRM-free (which I highly doubt in this case), ALL eBooks are rentals. Some timeout after 30 days, others timeout when your eReader breaks, others timeout when the publisher goes out of business or changes their DRM format, but they all timeout eventually if you have no way to migrate them to an open format.