Rumored Textbook Plans for Kindle

Ars Technica reports: The student textbook market will soon welcome another newcomer to the market in the form of a revamped Amazon Kindle, according to McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Bueneman. If true, it will have to compete with a number of other digital textbook options, but has the potential to win students' affections by changing the textbook market for the better.

Bueneman apparently learned of Amazon's plans after being briefed on them by management. "There are already several new, improved versions of the Kindle in the works," he wrote in an e-mailed note to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The company believes that there an opportunity to market (one of) the new devices to the education crowd, which it could do with a number of improvements to the current Kindle.

A Kindle revamp has been in the rumor mill for some time now, with an insider telling Ars in April that Amazon was planning to launch "the device they wanted to release in the first place." More recently, CrunchGear posted in July what it claimed were details about two new Kindles: one revamped version of the original, and one entirely new model. The new model will supposedly be considerably larger than the original and shaped like an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, and will be available to the public sometime next year.

It's this "new" version of the Kindle that will appeal to students the most, assuming Amazon decides to go ahead and pursue that market. There are other changes that have to happen with not only the Kindle but the e-book market in order for a "textbook" Kindle to be a hit with students, however. Continued price drops for e-books will help, as they'll be more attractive to students who currently resell their used textbooks at the end of each semester. A large inventory of textbooks will also help (there's no use in getting a Kindle for textbooks if you can only get one or two books on it), and the addition of student-friendly features (such as the ability to make annotations) would round out the list of things that would make such a thing appealing to students. Oh, and a low price would help too.

The college textbook market has been challenged lately by a number of digital initiatives, some of which are less legal than others. Savvy students who are getting sick of paying thousands of dollars for textbooks every year are beginning to scan them and put them on BitTorrent in droves. So far, publishers seem content with sending takedown notices to the sites that catalogue them instead of filing costly lawsuits. Still, even professors are outraged by the state of the textbook market, and some are pursuing legal alternatives to torrents by offering open-source textbooks and posting materials on wikis, blogs, and other social sites.

Although such initiatives aren't very widespread yet, they are gaining some traction in academia. A new and improved Kindle, geared toward getting electronic textbooks into even more hands, could help academia move further into the electronic age when it comes to the distribution of learning materials, and in the process, lighten the load on students' wallets.

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