Battery-Operated Textbooks

Imagine a campus in which students carry only man-purses, instead of 80-pound packs stuffed with textbooks. Amazon may soon get additional academic credit as more university publishers sign up with its wireless reading device.

Kindle will start carrying titles from Princeton University Press this fall. According to Inside Higher Education, the prestigious outlet joins the presses published by Oxford, Yale, and University of California in going digital.

The textbook savings aren't going to be instant. Kindle, which hit the market in November and was instantly backordered for weeks, cut its $399 price a measly $40. With some titles only a few dollars cheaper than the paper version, textbook readers save mostly on shipping costs and time. Plus, Kindle is clearly in its infancy with a clunky interface and, as one otherwise enthusiastic blogger notes, few social networking elements.

Still, people have been buying the digital reader, and one analyst calls it the new iPod. Amazon originally targeted the male tech-toy buyers, but women are apparently the true audience. Females have been warming to Kindle and currently makes up half of the device's searches, which have been growing after a post-holiday lull. The Wall Street Journal opines the product could be a moneysaver overall, partly due to its free mobile Internet access and costs of regular titles. Then of course there's instant gratification: Owners could download a former White House press secretary's sold-out memoir on the fly.

No word on whether Amazon will "pull an Apple" and come out with a thinner, sexier version at half the cost, but the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests a 2.0 is in the works.