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Amazon.com introduced Monday its new Kindle Textbook Rental, a service that allows students to save up to 80 percent off textbook list prices by renting them from the Kindle Store. According to the company, tens of thousands of textbooks are already available for the 2011-2012 school year from publishers, including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

"Students tell us that they enjoy the low prices we offer on new and used print textbooks," Amazon Kindle vice president Dave Limp said in a statement. "Now we're excited to offer students an option to rent Kindle textbooks and only pay for the time they need--with savings up to 80 percent off the print list price on a 30-day rental."

The service enables students to customize their rental periods to any length of time between 30 and 360 days, allowing them to pay only for the specific amount of time they need a textbook. Students can also extend any rental periods in increments of as little as a single day, or can choose to buy a book they're renting at any time.

"We've done a little something extra we think students will enjoy," Limp added. "Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We're extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere--even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced."

Kindle Textbooks can be read across several different devices, with free Kindle Reading Apps available for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android devices.

"The Amazon service is a challenge to upstart Chegg.com, which has built a sizable business renting primarily physical textbooks to students," notes Forbes' Tomio Geron. "Chegg, headed by former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, has also recently expanded to other areas, such as homework help and course scheduling. Another growing start-up in this space is Bookrenter.com."

For related news and other information from Schools.com, see:

• Digital learning: Final chapter for textbooks? (infographic)
• College students' study habits evolving with technology
• Blackboard launches real-time collaboration platform for education
• More than a third of college students say they use mobile apps while driving