Why Buy Expensive Textbooks When You Can Rent Them?

While some teachers are getting rid of textbooks in the classroom, one fact of life remains once a person reaches college—very expensive textbooks. Anyone who has signed up for classes in college knows that a list of pricey textbooks awaits them. Students wander bookstores with a heavy wallet and leave with some change in their pockets. And when the time comes to sell the books back, all they get back is a little more change. 

So why not just rent textbooks? This idea seems like a win-win situation for everybody involved. A recent New York Times article reports that renting textbooks has become a reality and the company doing this, Chegg, has seen their revenue skyrocket this past year. It seems that college students would rather rent a textbook for $33 than buy it for $123. Win-win.

Citing Netflix as an inspiration, Chegg founders Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra have seen their company gain steam as more students use their service. Venture capitalists have taken notice, and one company is investing $25 million in Chegg.

"Nobody likes paying for textbooks," said Arizona State University senior and Chegg user Alan Bradford. He's got that right. As I'm writing this post, I'm having horrific flashbacks of being one of those students wandering the campus bookstore with a long list of books to buy, knowing that, in a few minutes, my back pocket would be much lighter.

Comments

[Monica]

I have had good luck using www.campusbooks.com because it compares prices from all over the web and shows me the best deals, including rentals and used and ebooks.

[Errol]

When you buy a textbook for $135, then after the course sell it for $100, you've rented the textbook for $35.
Some differences with renting as you suggest, compared to the traditional buy/sell, is that someone else will take the hit when the edition changes, and YOU must not mark in the book

[Rhiannon Burkett]

I agree with Errol that renting and buying/selling back are essentially very similar. I do remember, when I was in college, buying a book for $100 and only getting $10 back at resell because the edition was now out of date. I feel that renting a book would solve this problem because as Errol mentioned, "someone else will take the hit". I also sometimes found it useful that the book was already highlighted by a previous owner because I immediately knew which sections were important. There seems like there are a lot of websites that buy, sell, or rent textbooks. It seems like a great market to get into for the website owner as well as the book owners and renters.

[Nicole]

Renting textbooks is a great idea! I wish someone had thought of this or that I knew about it when I was in college. It was so frustrating spending all that money on textbooks to get practically nothing back when you sold them back to the bookstore. My roomates and I often tried to share books for classes we had together. We were able to get many books off of half.com or amazon. At the end of the semester, some people sold the books on the amazon.com and wound up getting a little more money than if they had sold them to the university bookstore.

[Tony Angelino]

Will see if textbook renting takes off over time. If it does, it may change the industry and become more beneficial for College Students.

If you are a College Student like me, there are still ways to get around the high cost of textbooks. you can:
1. Buy your book online through price comparison websites like: www.bookstoreprices.com
2. There are also websites called textbook exchanges where College Students can buy and sell textbooks locally ie. www.studentbooksearch.com
3. Book Rental websites like: www.chegg.com, drawbacks can be the cost and if you will need to keep your books for reference in the future.
4. I also recommend to try and buy some of your books one edition behind as you can usually save around 80% of the cost and usually only about 10% of the information actually changes.