Can Amazon's Kindle disrupt the current textbook market?

BizOp News asks the question:

Is the Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation) a dis­rup­tive device for the text­book market?

via The BizOp News | Due Diligence : Can Kindle Replace Text Books?

His main argu­ment is that “Kindle threat­ens the estab­lished text­book mar­ket, because text­books can be treated as soft­ware, and rental items. You only want the text for one course, you rent it.”

He believes, along with oth­ers, that Amazon will likely act to push legal text­book authors to pub­lish ebooks — but they will be accom­pa­nied with licens­ing and DRM that will ensure their lim­ited dis­tri­b­u­tion and use and, pre­sum­ably, under­mine the used text­book mar­ket as well.

I believe the Kindle — and per­haps other devices like it — may indeed rev­o­lu­tion­ize the mar­ket. I am not con­vinced that all text­books are amenable to an elec­tronic model in terms of ease of use, but that may not stop the attempt by Amazon to push it.

To be hon­est, I sus­pect the entrenched nature of law and law schools will pre­vent Amazon’s com­plete suc­cess in any rapid fash­ion — I sus­pect a com­plete changeover to elec­tronic books will sim­ply run into too much resistance.

I also believe that “rent­ing” text­books stands a decent chance of gen­er­at­ing a back­lash against the cur­rent ebook licens­ing approach, as stu­dents (never ones to enjoy restric­tions, espe­cially ones that cost them money) dis­cover they can’t pass on their text­books to oth­ers by sell­ing or giv­ing them away.

Still, Amazon still has a chance to dis­rupt the mar­ket with­out such a back­lash — if the pur­chase price paid by stu­dents for books jus­ti­fies the more lim­ited rights they will enjoy. If Amazon can pull it off, every­one will ben­e­fit — if they give in to pub­lish­ers and keep prices arti­fi­cially high — we will see a back­lash and dis­rup­tion of a dif­fer­ent sort.

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