Not Yet Good News
Amazon is promising textbook rentals on the Kindle that could save 80% over the cost of buying new. That is good news, and any competition to break up the cozy and price-inflated textbook market is welcome.
But Amazon is going to have to rethink the Kindle and its software before this is ever going to work. I am a huge fan of the Kindle (though I have switched my reading to the Kindle app on the iPad). But it works best reading a book straight through. Want to page back and find a particular section -- good luck. The iPad app actually works better, with a touch screen slider that allows a little better browsing. But for textbooks, they really need some kind of page navigation like coverflow in the iPod (which I hate by the way in the iPod but would love for pages in a textbook).
David Zetland:
I've done kindle and PDF versions of TEoA (http://endofabundance.com/) and recommend that "textbook types" buy the PDF for it's page numbers (good for citing) and index.
Kindles can side-load PDFs, so the main problem is the "HTML-ness" of the kindle format.
Amazon needs to fix that up in terms of standards (footnotes, endnotes, citations, quasi page numbering, etc.)
July 18, 2011, 3:04 pmSpinMan:
Chegg is the way to go. Just rent the book and send it back.
July 19, 2011, 2:46 pm