Amazon Launches Kindle Textbook Rental Service

By Dianna Dilworth 

Amazon is offering students a new rental service for digital school books called Kindle Textbook Rental. The service lets students rent digital textbooks for different periods of time. The Kindle textbook rentals work on any Kindle device or app.

The service includes more than 10,000 textbooks for the 2011 school year, from textbook publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

Students can rent books for between 30 and 360 days, depending on their needs, and pay accordingly.  Users can extend rental periods as well as buy the eBooks they are renting.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Study application also lets students access digital textbooks.