Amazon Making Inroads In Academic Market With Kindle Reader
Sunday, July 12th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
The first Amazon Kindle reader – launched in November of 2007 – didn’t make a great impact on the academic community. The updated Kindle 2 – which started shipping in February 2009 – didn’t really improve matters very much – not from an educationalist’s viewpoint at least.
The relatively high purchase price of the reader may be a little too much for a lot of students, but that’s probably an issue which could be worked around. The main problem is that the 6” screen on both the original Kindle and the Kindle 2 – whilst perfectly adequate for reading normal books – is just too small for academic textbooks, the majority of which include diagrams and illustrations.
However, with the launch of the Kindle DX on June 10 2009, things may change – and very quickly. The new DX has a substantially bigger screen, 9.7” across the diagonal. It also has an accelerometer incorporated which allows users to flip from portrait to landscape automatically when the reader is rotated. Amazon is promoting the DX as the perfect solution for readers of newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks.
Amazon has already announced partnerships with a number of colleges and universities, including Princeton, Case Western, Arizona State and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. These institutions may offer the Kindle reader at a discount to some students and it does seem like a good way for Amazon to test the rapidly evolving market for higher education electronic books.
According to the National Association of College Stores, college book sales statistics for the year 2007-08 came to $5.4 billion. It’s a large market which would be attractive both to Amazon, who would hope to secure a good share of these sales, and for the educational bodies, who would hope to save significant amounts of money and to have an efficient method of keeping academic textbooks current and up to date.
As an example of the types of savings that could be achievable, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, recently announced that his state would start providing digital text books in the Fall of 2009. For a school district numbering 10,000 high school students, a yearly saving of $2 million is estimated. Savings may vary for tertiary education due to the slightly different nature and cost of text books – but the savings are certainly there for the taking. Money saved in this manner would hopefully be made available for use in other areas.
With potential profits for ebook reader vendors, and savings for educational bodies, it seems likely that there will be some serious competition in this important market sector in the very near future. At this time Amazon do seem to be in the dominant position, but Plastic Logic, News Corp. and Hearst are all rumored to be readying large format ebook readers for launch in 2010. Apple has also announced that they will be launching a tablet type notebook, well suited for reading ebooks, in the near future.
Apart from profits for Amazon and its competitors and savings for the educational establishment, it is to be hoped that individual students will benefit as a result of investment of monies that would not otherwise be available. The availability of cheaper, more frequently updated textbooks should also be a good thing and, in future, it seems probable that different, more interactive, learning methods may be developed .
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