The New Kindle DX and Textbooks

There was a really interesting article by Robert Spar at thebottomline.org about text books and the Kindle DX.

According to the article in 2005 students paid an estimated $900 for text books. The article also states "Three textbook publishers that collectively publish 60% of the country's textbooks recently agreed to publish Kindle versions of their books. At least six universities will be running Kindle pilot programs, wherein a number of students will be provided with the devices to see how students react to the devices."

It has been pretty clear that Amazon has launched the Kindle DX to scoop up the textbook market and has done so early enough to beat out the competition from other larger sized ebook readers that are due to be released later this year. Princeton University, which received a grant to purchase the Kindle DX for students, is one of the half-dozen schools participating in a pilot project with Amazon . The other schools running DX pilot programs are Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Reed College, and University of Virginia Darden School of Business and Pace University.

Many schools are looking at this as a possible cost savings by reducing the amount of paper used by students. Documents that are normally printed, copied, and handed out to students can be delivered in an electronic format instead of printed. Princeton had estimated that it spent $5 million on paper last year.