Amazon Kindle May Be Coming To Classrooms

The Kindle, the popular ebook reader from Amazon may be coming to college and university classrooms near you.

According to a story on Seattle PI, Amazon is designing a new Kindle that will be optimized for use with text books.  The college text book industry generates over $5.5 billion in revenue annually, and 95% of the books are offered in an ebook format already, but there has been no optimal reader for them. The new Kindle will supposedly be bigger, making it more suited to the text book format.

This hopefully will come to be as this will cut down on the amount of paper consumed, but it could also kill the used textbook industry in minutes as no one will have anything to sell any more.  If the book companies were smart, they would sell the Kindles at a greatly subsidized price, the current versions sell for $395,  like cell phone companies do, and lock the students in to a contract with them for their future book purchases.

The thing I fear the most is we won’t see any reduction in the price for the texts though they will be highly more profitable for the publishers.  The chances of that being passed on to the consumers is slim to none, but you can always hope.

Will it actually take off?  Only time will tell, but having lugged around giant textbooks, nothing would have made me happier to have something the size of the Kindle to carry around instead.