Amazon has announced that they will start allowing students to rent textbooks on their Kindle for 30 - 360 days for "up to 80% off the list price of the print textbook".
Annotations that the student makes to the textbook will be preserved even after the rental period ends.
I didn't see much in the way of pharmacy-specific titles for rent, but Amazon plans to make more and more titles available over time.
Are we seeing the beginning of the end for paper and ink textbooks?
Monday, July 18, 2011
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Several publishers who we've talked to have renting models, where students pay a smaller fee for shorter-term access to the textbook. The DRM is fairly robust, I understand, so it's difficult to copy and print with these books. It's an interesting model...
ReplyDeleteHopefully, the DRM won't be too annoying. I get emails on a fairly regular basis from students and faculty who have trouble with Access Pharmacy through the web browser. The Kindle probably does a better job of balancing usability and security.
ReplyDeleteGary Theilman
University of Mississippi
Interesting...yes, the DRM can be pretty difficult, I think. Some publishers are standardizing on Inkling (Lippincott, and some others, I think) which I think has an awful lot of potential. What has been your experience with Access Pharmacy? We are considering going in...pros and cons?
ReplyDeleteJude Higdon
University of Minnesota
Access Pharmacy seems to have a low threshhold for logging-out users
ReplyDelete- Being logged in too long without apparent activity
- Opening too many new browser windows
Once they boot a student out, sometimes they won't allow them to log back in again until they've completely shut down the all the browser windows and started the browser again.
Having the content appear within a particular proprietary program or device might make the DRM less irritating than it is when trying to control access through just the web browser.
Gary Theilman
University of Mississippi