Would you consider renting e-books from Amazon?

Just now I ran across an Amazon listing (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/B004OBZYES/#reader_B004OBZYES) that offers these e-book options:

Rent From: $38.56 or Buy Price: $84.00

On the right side of the page there is a link for details:

To see your rental price, simply select an end date 30 to 360 days from today and pay only for the time you need your book. Here are some prices for this book:

Rental Duration Price
30-day $38.56
60-day $48.20
90-day $56.70
120-day $61.42

Not sure how long to rent? You can start with just 30-days and extend your rental or purchase the book at any time before your rental ends and receive full credit for the amount you've spent to rent the book.

Even disregarding the pricing, which I assume would vary between titles, I cannot think of this as anything kinder than bizarre. It just doesn't seem far removed from simply throwing money away. I have done used-book exchanging (buy cheap paperbacks from a used-book store, read, take back and get some credit toward future purchases) and although it's not balanced (store still has to make money) it's not totally one-sided, either, which this scheme of Amazon's seems to be.

I really don't know since I'm not in the market for An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe (Routledge Studies in Archaeology). This kind of textbook rental might have a real price advantage if it's a text that you're not going to keep for reference once the course is over. Also, by using an e-text, you can get your book immediately rather than have to wait for snail-mail delivery, and you may be working against some course deadline.

I'm a little bit skeptical generally of e-texts for textbooks, only because of screen-size on reading devices and the lack of color and illustration detail. I'm a devout Kindler from the very earliest K1 days, but I use it for literary works and I'm not an archaeologist, engineer, biochemist, rocket scientist, or whatever. But if this textbook is conveniently readable on your e-reader device and it's a text that you don't want to keep for future reference, this may not be a bad deal at all considering that you don't have to scrounge around in brick-and-mortars for some obscure title and you're getting electronic delivery of something you may have "needed yesterday" without having to wait for delivery of a treeware text from an online seller who may wind up being out-of-stock and cause you further delay.

I wouldn't consider it.

I wouldn't, but then I'm not a student. It does seem that it would be useful for textbooks, which many students currently rent in their physical form.

I agree with >2 CurrerBell:. If you only want it for a limited time, why buy it if you can rent it more cheaply? The question for me is whether the ebook is as usable and enjoyable as the hardcopy.

I would not consider this. My local library has electronic books to borrow and there is no fee. And if the book is not available there in electronic format, it is almost always available in paper and ink :)

I have a Nook so I can't speak for Amazon's e-book rentals, but I rented an e-book from Barnes and Noble for a class I had to take. I paid about $80 for a 4 or 5 month rental and could download it on 2 different devices. I downloaded it to my laptop, which I was carrying with me anyway, and didn't have to lug around an extra book. It was actually pretty cool because I could just do a keyword search instead of flipping through the index if I needed to find specific information.

If I had bought the same book in paper, it would have cost about $150 with tax; I would have been lucky to get $50 re-selling it, so I actually saved money by renting the book rather than buying it.

As a student I might rent it - I used to buy practically unreadable used paper copies of textbooks that were more highlighter and underlines than text because I could save a few bucks.

I rent my textbooks for school. For online courses I use Kindle for PC and the search feature is awesome for taking open book tests and things like that. They're much cheaper usually and since texts are so outrageous and, at least for me, basically useless after the course is over, I'm completely fine with time-limit usage to save that much money.

It's definitely a hugely useful thing for students, as described above. Textbooks are absurdly expensive and you get a mere fraction of that back at the end, if anything (you may often be met with "they're using a different book/new edition next year so we don't need that" and then you're SOL).

As far as a "normal" book goes, of course not, the value wouldn't be there.