Another Reason College Textbooks are Hosed

If the rumors are correct, Amazon is in the game. see snippet below. Amazon large size Kindle + FlatWorld Knowledge and the all inevitable copy cats. Hearst has already announced that they are coming to market with a large format ebook reader. And students in Germany are already using Ebook readers instead of textbooks.

Barnes and Noble is going to have react. Used textbooks is too much of the bottom line. So espresso machines in every college bookstore?

Next on the agenda is K-12 textbooks.
But in K -12, Print is a must have, not a nice to have. So . . Espresso machines in every school district's CRD? or Versioned newspapers that are printernet published?

Given the size of the education space, my bet is both.

The Big-Screen Kindle: It's About Textbooks, Not Saving the Newspapers -
@ReadWriteWeb: "According to a number of well-substantiated rumors, Amazon is set to debut a new, large-screen version of its Kindle eBook reader on Wednesday morning during a press conference at Pace University in New York City. A lot of the current discussion around this announcement has focused on how a new Kindle might or might not be able to save the ailing newspaper industry, but in many respects, it seems more likely that Amazon is simply planning to turn the Kindle into a better platform for electronic textbooks.
Textbooks

In some respects, though, the new Kindle (which will, after all, see its debut at a college) is probably geared more towards the textbook market than the newspaper business. For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market, where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion, about a third of the total market for educational and professional books."