Amazon has confirmed that they are in fact working on a version of their popular e-book reader, Kindle, for college and universities. The new version of the e-book reader would be used primarily by students who want an electronic version of their textbooks rather than regular copies of the books, which are typically quite large.

Reportedly textbooks are a 5.5 billion dollar market. Many textbook publishers have started offering electronics versions of their books as well as the standard paper versions, but there isn’t currently an e-book reader on the market designed to work well with them.
The new version of Kindle geared at college students is rumored to have a larger screen, better suiting it to larger textbooks.

It was reported earlier this year that Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindle’s since launch. While the company released a statement indicating that number was a little high, they have undoubtedly sold quite a few of the readers.

Do you think college students will want to leave their paper textbooks behind in favor of an electronic version? One downside of having your books on the Kindle would be that it would be much more difficult to flip through a text when you’re looking for an answer to a question, and if you have a professor who likes to refrence the book a great deal in class you could have a time trying to navigate forward and backwards at the speed of the lecture.

When I went to school one of my favorite parts of the semester was selling back my textbooks to the bookstore after the semester was finished and using the money I made to “celebrate” the end of the semester. With the Kindle, students won’t really be able to share their textbooks with other students, or sell them back at the end of the year. It’ll be interesting to see how the electronic versions are priced as opposed to the paper versions for that reason.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am under Amazon, Retail, Technology.  Print This Post

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