This only applies to college students... too bad. Renting books would be great for the general public, too.

I was going to make a library joke, but seriously, your local library has access to an amazing amount of books.

Even if your particular library doesn't have a particular book, there is likely a library somewhere in their network that has it, and will ship it for free.

All you have to do is ask.

This doesn't seem very profitable when so many textbooks come out with a new edition every year.

Look at the prices - e.g. $170 new, $100 to rent.

http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Kenn...

Chegg, an online textbook rental company, up to now has been doing pretty well.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/05/teardown-chegg/

Chegg's revenue is going to take a hit if Amazon is competing in the same space.

Tangential, but does anyone know why Amazon's PR has a completely unrecognizable domain name?

There is something fishy here. Neither www.corporate-ir.net nor corporate-ir.net resolve. And the site asks you to login.

Relevant link is:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/465600/

A whois query (http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=corporate-ir.net...) reveal corporate-ir.net domain belongs to Thomson Reuters Holdings Inc.

I got this link from https://twitter.com/amazoncareers. Now, that account is authentic or not that's another question.

FWIW, if you go to http://www.amazon.com/pr (which I think you can safely expect to be owned and operated by Amazon), you DO get redirected to corporate-ir.net. That's what ultimately convinced me that the press release was legit.

It still bothers me, though.

You can also find the same information about textbook rentals by going directly to Amazon's site and going to their textbooks department.