Photo by wohnai

Nate Desmond over at Debtfree Scholar has written an excellent post on exactly how to rent a textbook online, and has screen shots up to walk you through the procedure. If you are curious about renting textbooks, Nate has provided you with a great place to start.

Here are links to  previous posts I wrote about renting vs. buying textbooks. It contains links to several companies that buy or rent textbooks online so that you can do some comparison shopping before you buy or rent. Don’t forget that there are now some companies that offer e-textbooks that you can download and save a tree, and also your back. Sheesh, I still remember wondering how large a load my back would bear when strapping on my textbook-laden backpack!

Good luck, and good bargains to you in your textbook rentals or purchases for the upcoming semester.

According to an article from WSJ.com published July 20, 2009, bookseller Barnes & Noble has taken a major step into the increasingly competitive e-book game to announce that they have started an e-bookstore with 700,000 titles that will be available to the consumer via their smart phones such as the Blackberry and iPhone.  They will offer a variety of classics and bestsellers for $9.99.  As well, B&N is including over 500,000 public domain titles for free download.

I find the development of the e-book market fascinating. With Amazon recently dropping the price on the Kindle reader, it seems that the idea of the e-book is starting to catch fire. No word yet if B&N plan on any textbook titles in their offerings, but I’m sure that many classic works of literature are already in the public domain for you English majors. The availability of e-book on the smart phone is a big game changer, since you don’t have to purchase a separate device to access your e-books. Talk about being portable! It will be very interesting to see what Amazon will do in response to this offering from B&N.

If you’d like more information on textbook options for students, including sources for e-book textbooks, please see my earlier post on the subject.

There has been a lot of hype about the Amazon Kindle electronic reader. The device allows users to download up to 1500 books in less than 60 seconds. Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle 2 from $359 U.S. to $299 U.S. Does this price drop now put the Kindle within reach of college students budgets?

First of all, the idea of electronic books is a great one. E-books save trees and the backs of students lugging those extra heavy backpacks. Kindle owners can download most new books at a price of $9.99 which is a considerable savings from new hardbook releases. Unfortuately, the large size of textbooks is not very compatible with the design of the Kindle. To accomodate the larger size of textbooks, the Kindle DX is the recommended device. Naturally, the larger size screen of the Kindle DX (9.7 inches vs. 6 inches for the Kindle 2) brings with it a larger price tag as well. The DX version of the Kindle sells for $489, which is not an inexpensive investment for the college student. It does, however, have the capacity to store up to 3500 books.

But one obstacle that the Kindle has not overcome yet is that it does not yet have color capacity–all type and pictures are reproduced in grey scale. While this is not a problem for a novel for your English class, it is a definite drawback for science classes. Can you imagine trying to study musculature for your anatomy class when everything is rendered in gray?

So while the Kindle is an idea whose time has come, I would not purchase one with the intention of downloading textbooks just yet. A $489 price tag for the DX model is still very pricey, and I am willing to bet that within the next year or so more improvements such as the ability to render pages in color will come to the technology. I would wait on these improvements and further drops in price before I would invest in the Kindle.

If you are interested in e-textbook options, or options for cheaper textbooks in general, please see my earlier posts on textbooks options, here and here.