Everything You Need to Know About Renting Textbooks Online
January 29, 2010 | VReitano
Unfortunately, it took me all four years of college to learn that I could actually rent – and mark up – my college textbooks, but that doesn’t mean you have to suffer the same misfortune. I’ve researched the best places to rent textbooks on the web to help you save yourself some cash.
Textbooks are one of the most expensive elements of the “college” experience, and often you don’t realize this until you try to return them to the bookstore at the end of the semester. I don’t know about your campus, but my bookstore continually offers a buyback service and then rarely buys books back, and if they do, they are for significantly lower than the purchase price. I’ve sold books on other Web sites, but that too can be a hassle – you have to bring them home from your campus apartment, and then you have to actually remember to ship them. And worst of all is when you pay to list them on Amazon or eBay and no one buys them! There’s a new “craze” in the world of college textbooks and it’s called renting. I had never, ever heard of this before I started blogging for StudentStuff and quite frankly, I wish my University had told me about it in my Freshman year. You already know about a great site – Chegg – but here are some alternatives in case you can’t find the book you need on that site.
Campus Book Rentals: This Web site allows you to order books for a semester, quarter or summer session. Additionally you can extend rentals for 15 or 30 days and you have 30 days to return a book in case you choose to drop a class or change your schedule. If you happen to need to re-take the class, you can re-rent the books for 30% off the rental price at the end of your first rental period, and returning books is free and easy – they provide the rental envelope and pay for shipping! There is also free shipping when you first order your books, and according to their site you can save up to 90% using them as opposed to buying books in the bookstore or on other sites.
Book Rental: This Web site claims that you will save 75% off your order by renting through them, and receive free premium shipping. You can also follow them on Twitter or join them on Facebook to receive notification of special offers. They are currently also sponsoring a Haiti drive and have raised $25,000 thus far. Book Rental uses UPS to send and receive books and thus it makes it a lot easier to get them on time.
College Book Renter: This site supports the American Heart Association via a donation made every six months from revenue generated by the book orders. They claim that you can save up to 85% by using them instead of the school bookstore, and allow you to use paypal to make an instant transfer of funds.
Many of these sites also allow you to sell back old textbooks you have laying around for a higher price than the bookstore as well. They are all a way to live eco-friendly in 2010 as recycling textbooks is eco-friendly, easy to do, and saves you a ton of cash.
Check out one of these sites today and see what you think. Let us know, below, if you have any interesting sites for renting and maybe we can review them in another textbook post.
Happy Renting, Studying and Good Luck in Spring 2010!
You forgot http://www.bigwords.com They are a textbook search engine that searches all the online textbook retailers (including amazon, half, ebay etc) and rental sites (including chegg, bookrenter etc) to find you the best prices. You can even use them at the end of the semester to search for resellers to sell your books to.