Amazon announced a new opportunity for college students to rent their textbooks as ebooks through its Kindle platform instead of buying the books outright. The ebook rental prices will at times be as much as 80% less than the retail value of the books. I can see this affecting students in three ways:1. Students will no longer give Christmas presents to their families or be able to go home for the summer. The valuable income that comes at the end of the semester when students sell back the books their parents or student loans paid for will be lost as the text-ebooks vanish into the ether.
2. Students will no longer have a proper reminder for classes. Waking up at the crack of noon, stumbling over to the mini-fridge to get that first brew, then BAM! Your big toe cracks into the edge of your Algebra II book. As you collapse to the floor in pain, you remember that your final for Civics is tomorrow. How? The girl that saw you vomit off the balcony onto the goat that time is in both your Algebra and Civics class. Without the book, you would never remember.
3. Rolling joints and doing blow on a Kindle sucks the big one. Seriously, have you ever tried to cut anything on the screen of that eInk stuff? Cuts it right up. And remember how happy you were to shake out the book and find a toothpick's worth of weed in the cracks of the pages? So happy.
[ComputerWorld]