The Big Kindle; a Bibliophile’s Prognosis
Thursday, May 7th, 2009The Buick got bigger. Amazon announced yesterday the release of the new, large format Kindle, specifically designed to appeal to students. Unfortunately, I think that its doomed to fail in the college market – at least on its own merits for three intertwined reasons. As a reader, a book industry guy, and an at-least-one-course-a-year student [...]
Tips for Saving Money on Textbooks
Thursday, July 17th, 2008I was once a poor student like yourself. To save up enough cash for Ramen noodles, a Netflix subscription and tickets to my favorite music venues, I had to get pretty creative with my textbook expenses. What I learned is that there are plenty of resources beyond your campus bookstore to help you obtain the [...]
Textbooks, or, the Battle of Students vs Publishers – Part II
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Apologies in advance for belaboring the point in regards to my previous post on the broken textbook industry, but another interesting article on custom textbook publishing appeared this morning in the Wall Street Journal. The article is mostly self-explanatory, so I won’t go into a lengthy discussion, but I would like to ask the reader [...]
Textbooks, or, The Battle of Students vs Publishers
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008// We in the book industry should be well enough read to know the maxim: history repeats. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting story about a new movement among students to scan textbooks into PDFs to share across P2P (peer to peer) networks. Publishers are, of course, furious. They’ve enlisted outside legal agents [...]