A commuter reads on a Kindle e-reader while riding the subway in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 18, 2011.BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters
In an effort to snag a larger segment of the college textbook market in the United States, Amazon.com Inc. has begun renting textbooks on its Kindle e-reader.
On Monday, the leading online retailer said students can rent tens of thousands of textbooks from its online Kindle Store, which Kindle users can access on the e-reader. Amazon said its rental prices are as much as 80 per cent lower than the list prices for the books.
Seattle-based Amazon said books are available from publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.
Students can rent the books for as little as 30 days or as many as 360 days, and can add an extra day or buy the book if they want, Amazon said.
According to the National Association of College Stores, which represents more than 3,000 college bookstores, over 2,400 of its member stores offered rentals of physical textbooks in January, and nearly all are expected to do so by this fall. Students can also turn to Web-based textbook rental companies such as Chegg.com for physical books, or rent e-textbooks to read on devices such as a laptop or Apple Inc.'s iPad.
Amazon shares fell $3.57, or 1.7 per cent, to $209.30 in afternoon trading Monday.