Amazon.com online book store yesterday introduced a model of rental textbooks to students. Book rental model is available for digital book reader Kindle.
Kindle, digital book reader, through Amazon can be hired
Students can rent books for at least 30 days. Borrowing period can be extended. Tenants can also keep an annotation and some parts of the book underlined, although the loan has expired. This is because Amazon will store it in their cloud computing service and will automatically sync when the user re-hire the same book.
How many parts are underlined can be saved? According to a spokesman for Amazon, it depends on the policy book publishers. One publisher, John Wiley & Sons, for example, did not say how much. However, they promised to help students. "We support the student needs to keep some portion of the lease is very important after they expire," said a spokesman for the publisher.
Other publishers involved in the program are Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Oxford University Press.
On the other hand, reading through the text book digital book readers like the Kindle, according to a study, did not make students uncomfortable. Researchers at the University of Washington found that students difficult to move from illustration and references to the text, when read with a digital book reader. Read a book where the illustrations are placed directly on the page is still easier.
Digital books are also considered to have been messed cognitive mapping, a process in which students use it to find and bring back the position information in books and on the page.
