It’s that time of year again and schools all over the UK are preparing to break up for the summer holidays. Six weeks off – Teachers, I envy you.
It’s a joyous time for those who have a nice long summer but there’s also some great news from Amazon for parents who had to pay for expensive textbooks at the start of last year that are now pretty useless.
The company has launched a trade-in scheme for old textbooks. If any of your books are featured on Amazon’s list of 22,000 chosen titles then you can exchange them for credit on your Amazon account, which can be spent on whatever you like. Amazon is offering free courier pick-up, so you won’t need to worry about finding cheap international shipping in order to send the books back either.
Now in America, Amazon users don’t even need heavy, paper textbooks in the first place. The company has launched a textbook rental service which lets students pick from a variety of titles and make big discounts by going digital. All the texts can be read on devices such as iPods, Kindle readers and tablet computers, so students will only have to carry a single device around rather than a stack of heavy books from lesson to lesson.
I love this idea, especially since I always feel sorry when I see children walking home from school lugging around huge heavy bags…surely it can’t be good for their backs! Also as you know, I’m in favour of anything that will help the world become more eco-friendly. What do you think?