Amazon presents a new e-textbook rental service - Does it make the Kindle any greener?

Three months after Amazon announced it would allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries on the devices, it is going even further and launching Kindle Textbook Rental.

According to Amazon's press release, tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

Interesting feature of the new program is its flexibility - Kindle Textbook Rental offers the ability to customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days. Students can also easily extend any rental period in increments as small as one day or choose to purchase the book they are renting at any time. The electronic textbooks can be downloaded to and read not just on Amazon's Kindle, but also on other devices such as PC, Mac and iPad using Kindle reading software.

The company claims that students can save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. This element will be very effective in getting more students to use the program. For example, Ryan Judy of Ohio University told msnbc.com that he "would, and probably will, use Kindle's service because I have an iPad and you can just download the Kindle textbooks on there, which makes it really convenient. It's also cheaper. I normally try find the cheapest way to get my books."

It is very interesting development in Amazon's services, but only a natural one as we see a growing interest in digital books among students. My question is whether this new service also helps in making the Kindle greener?

It's obvious that renting textbooks is more eco-friendly than buying new ones because this way you maximize the usage of already printed book. Just like with books, after reading a number textbooks on an e-reader, this practice is becoming greener than the alternative - buying paper textbooks. As the length of textbooks is usually higher tend to be longer (500-600 pages in many cases, if not longer), their footprint is larger than the one of 'regular' books and hence the breakeven point of e-textbooks is smaller than the one of e-books.

So we can definitely see that it would be relatively easy to establish e-textbooks rentals as a greener option with a smaller footprint, but does it make Amazon or the Kindle any greener? It's a difficult question because there is no difference in terms of e-reading if you buy an electronic textbook or rent it. Either way, you're using one electronically instead of its paper version. Nevertheless, the fact that renting might be cheaper for students makes etextbook rental more attractive and increases the chances students will move to textbook e-reading.

This service won't change the carbon footprint of the Kindle - it doesn't change anything in the device's production, transportation, usage or recycling. Also, there's actually a good chance many students will use a Kindle reading app to read it on their iPad or even just read it on their PC.

As you can see it's complicated to estimate the impact of the new service, but there are two things we can say for certain: 1. Amazon's new service might lower eventually the breakeven points of e-readers and tablets as the usage of textbooks electronically will be increased due to the new rental service. 2. Amazon's new service will help eventually in making textbook reading more sustainable. Hopefully it will also help students to get better grades!

To read more on how green is your (and my) Kindle, visit our website at http://www.ecolibris.net/kindle.asp

More resources on the ebooks vs. paper books environmental debate can be found on our website at http://www.ecolibris.net/ebooks.asp.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant one tree for every book you read!

The new Kindle wants to offer students an offer they can't refuse

Amazon introduced today the Kindle DX, a larger version of the Kindle, targeted at readers of textbooks, newspapers and documents.

It is definitely larger than Kindle 2 - Kindle DX’s display has 2.5 times the surface area of Kindle’s 6-inch display. It's also more expensive - the DX costs $489, $130 more than the Kindle 2.

The new addition to the Kindle family is mainly focused on students and newspaper readers. When we talk about students, we talk of course about textbooks. And there's a good reason for that - the $9.8 billion textbook market which Amazon is hoping to penetrate.

According to Wired, Amazon said it had reached agreements with three major textbook publishers representing 60% of the higher-education market books available in the Kindle store: Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and Wiley Higher Education. Amazon also collaborates with six colleges and universities — Pace, Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and the University of Virginia — to test the new device with students later this year.

The new Kindle is expected to face couple of challenges, especially when it comes to students. Firstly, it competes with laptop, a device more than 80% own and allow you to buy, download and read e-textbooks, usually on a larger screen. Also, the Kindle can't show video or color images, which is a big disadvantage especially with the growing power of video content (the Kindle DX is designed to mimic the experience of reading printed black ink on paper).

Another challenge is pricing. e-textbooks are usually cheaper in 50% than paper textbooks, so how much will Kindle's textbooks cost? will they also have price advantage in comparison to textbooks you can download to your laptop, or there won't be any difference. In the meantime, there's no information available yet - the Wall Street Journal reported that a spokeswoman for Pearson said its education division, which publishes textbooks for all grade levels, hasn't yet decided how many titles will be available or how much the Kindle versions will cost.

Besides convincing students why they need to buy Kindle in addition to their laptop (no student will buy the new Kindle instead of laptop), Amazon is facing competition from couple of other companies, as the New York Times reports today. Few companies, according to the NYT, are expected to begin selling portable reading devices in the next year, including Plastic Logic, a well-financed start-up which we wrote about last year, FirstPaper, backed by the publisher Hearst; and Apple.

Jeff Bezos said today that the new Kindle is a step in the direction of a long-dreamed-of paperless society. His vision of paperless society is definitely one we can identify with as it will be also an important step towards sustainable reading.

Nevertheless, we're still waiting for more assurance that Kindle is the right tool to achieve this goal, and that it doesn't have any environmental impacts that would be greater than its positive contribution to the environment. As soon as we'll have more conclusive data with regard to this issue, we will be able to look at the Kindle as a green solution, but at the moment we will lack the necessary information to be able to determine that.

More posts on Amazon:

Amazon did great on the first quarter. Can it also help the book industry to go green now?

Kindle2 series:
Part 1 - David Pouge and the final battle

Part 2 - Bezos on the Daily Show

Part 3 - How much money it will make?

Part 4 - Authors Guild and the read-aloud feature

Part 5 - Did you kindle today?

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net