Buying textbooks is annoying! They’re expensive, heavy and instantly useless after finals. Amazon is trying to change the game with Kindle Textbook Rentals, it’s a service that lets students rent Kindle textbooks to save tons of money.
ScrollMotion’s been tapped to to transmogrify textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and every standardised test-taking student’s favourite, Kaplan. The WSJ says that education was indeed a “focal point” in the iPad’s development, which we reported months ago.
The hype and hope on the Apple Tablet is ridiculous right now, and the WSJ is just piling it on with talk about it revolutionising television, textbooks and newspapers like the iPod changed music. Let’s all just calm down here.
They’re hugely different devices, sure, but could the iPhone be stepping on the Kindle’s toes again? CourseSmart, which offers subsciption-based, notes-capable eBooks online, has released a full-featured iPhone app for their subscribers. In other words, yes.
Good idea or terrible idea? Sheet music on the Kindle. They catalog has 20,000 titles and they’re cheap, about $US3. Or you can always read a bunch of law textbooks. Fun! [Amazon via Gadget Lab]
