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Originally Posted by daffy4u
Do you think the Kindle version will cost as much as the paper version? If they cost significantly less, there may be no need to re-sell.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if sharing books on the same account will work with the DX or if textbook licensing will prohibit that. It would be cool if students could group together on one account and share textbooks (provided they share many of the same classes).
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The KDX's in the student trial are going to be preloaded with textbooks, not from Kindle Store. So it would have nothing to do with Amazon accounts. Who knows how the publishers intend to distribute these things; but my guess is that they'll work with campus booksellers who will load them onto the student's KDX, perhaps with some DRM foo to tie it to that device or to otherwise be able to track copies back to a specific person. The publishers are not going to want to blow off the campus textbook retailers who they have been in cahoots with all these long years, at least not when they still need them.
So for the trial at least, it is likely they are in PDF format since that would be the easiest thing to do.
But beyond that, I don't think there's a long, prosperous future in textbook publishing: sooner or later, open source digital textbooks are going to kill the textbook market just like Wikipedia killed encyclopedias. But in the meantime, the textbook publishers will try to rake in as much profit as possible for as long as possible before closing their doors.
I don't think Amazon is even expecting to make any significant money in the textbook market. They just want to grab mind share and market share for book sales as a whole. So it's just more publicity for Kindle. If students actually buy some, so much the better, they'll be buying something from the Kindle Store, and that is where Amazon makes money, not on sales of Kindles.
I agree with others that KDX is not and never will be a must-have device for students; a laptop is.