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Yesterday, Amazon announced Kindle Textbook Rental, a new program giving students the option to rent selected textbooks for up to 360 days at a prorated price instead of buying them outright. Even if they aren't the single solution to the e-books for education equation, full-color digital textbooks offer yet another clue that Amazon's got more than just paper and E Ink on their minds for this fall.
Apart from their reader-selected expiration date, rented textbooks work much like other Kindle e-books. They can be read on Amazon's e-readers or any of its mobile and desktop apps. Amazon's cloud service WhisperSync keeps notes, highlights, and reading progress up-to-date across devices. With textbook rentals, though, readers will be able to keep and access their notes and highlights even after the rental term is up -- something you can't do with scribbles in the margins of a resold paper book.
Total cost varies according to the length of the rental. For instance, one of Amazon's featured textbooks, Information Technology for Management, costs about $150 in hardcover, $90 as an e-book, and between $31.55 (for a 30-day rental) and $77.34 (for a 360-day rental). After the 30-day minimum, each additional rental day costs roughly 26 cents, so for most rentals, the bulk of the cost would be fixed up-front. And at the end of a rental period, readers can still extend their rentals a day at a time before the e-book disappears.
It's not bad. Textbooks haven't had much success on e-readers, partly because their bright-color, high-detail illustrations don't translate to E Ink or even most color tablets. That's a cost a textbook publisher can't get back, and a student still winds up paying for.
Amazon gets around this through its PC and Mac applications, which can show off those illustrations in color and at scale. The E Ink Kindle becomes an ancillary device here, much like the mobile phone app is for a paperback novel: you can study up and make notes on the go, but most of your reading will be on the machine where it's easiest to type notes and where you do the rest of your schoolwork.
Textbook rentals and note-syncing are also perhaps the best argument for e-book digital rights management, or DRM. Only with DRM can books and metadata sync across devices; only with DRM are e-book rentals possible. (Somewhere, thrifty student hackers are firing up their terminal scripts and BitTorrent clients, ready to become the most popular nerd in their calculus section.)
Amazon's increased business in large-scale full-color books also points towards the imminent release of its long-rumored, seemingly-inevitable full-color tablet. The more the bookseller puts this kind of skin in the game, the more likely it looks that they'll have an iPad/DX-sized reading tablet ready to go by the time back-to-school shopping starts, if not an overhaul of the entire Kindle line.
Textbooks, though, are a constant reminder that the book industry is both gigantic and fundamentally weird. Textbooks have less to do with trade paperbacks than distant relatives in the same family. The publishers are different; the readers are different; and most importantly, the ways that readers buy and use their books are different. And even within the subdomain of textbooks, reader expectations and behavior vary wildly.
Textbooks are typically built to last forever, but are constantly updated and reissued. They're chosen by teachers, but bought by students. They're read for information, not pleasure -- but unlike most reference books, the same sections are reread over and over again. In some professions, like medicine, many readers keep their books forever; in others, they're sold back for beer money before final exams are even graded.
All that has made digital textbooks a hard business to crack. Osman Rashid made a fortune with Chegg, a popular website for renting traditional textbooks. But his well-funded digital textbook venture Kno went from a dedicated hardware prototype to an iPad app in less than a year. Other sites like BookRenter partner with a network of campus stores, like Barnes & Noble to Chegg's Amazon. There's no single model that has won out just yet.
Even the Kindle DX was supposed to replace textbooks before it became a general-purpose, oversized e-reader. Even if Amazon keeps the Kindle as a 6-7" E Ink device, don't be surprised if the DX gets replaced by a color tablet for textbooks, magazines, games, and apps.
If Amazon is betting on students who'd rather rent than own, Nature Publishing Group and California State University is looking for those who want to keep their textbooks perpetually new. Their interactive Principles of Biology textbook/website comes with a lifetime license for just $49. Cal State's Northridge campus has paid for a university-wide site license for their students.
It's the first in a series of such textbooks from NPG, all of which the publisher promises will be continually kept up-to-date. With luck, your physician won't be consulting a book she bought as a med student thirty years ago. (I could tell you stories.)
But the book-as-website model depends on constant online access (or local caching or printouts), rock-solid site infrastructure and publishers' ability to keep updates smooth for readers and inexpensive for themselves. It also depends on university partners who are willing to support the project with site licenses, and/or readers in disciplines in which lifetime access to up-to-date information is worth the extra cost.
Already this summer, we're seeing very different models for digital textbooks. In the next few years, as devices and their capabilities change and proliferate, and universities and their practices remain stubbornly heterogeneous, I suspect we'll see more experiments still. But don't count out those marked-up hardcovers just yet.
