Textbook Rentals: Save Money, Save Stress

Let’s say you actually bought the textbook for, say, a post-grad course with that attractive exchange student on the agricultural affects of the Soviet collapse in Belarus. And let’s say the book is one of those big, fat, expensive ones (150 pages about corn alone!) that gives you back problems for years and years to come after lugging it around the Baylor campus.

And let’s say when you head over to the book store to sell it back, you learn about a new edition of the book due to come out, or about how the course was dropped from future schedules for lack of interest (kids these days just don’t care about Belarus). So now your stuck with a big, fat, expensive, back-breaking book that, since you never, ever plan to vacation on a farm in Belarus, will be best used as a new ottoman.

There’s an easy way to avoid this (surprisingly common) scenario: textbook rentals.

Simple. Money-saving. Stress-free. Textbook rental opportunities are popping up all over college towns like Austin and Waco, and for good reasons.

Textbook costs are simply staggering these days. It’s not uncommon to start off a semester at Baylor University or the University of Texas with nearly $1,000 of book costs added on to the already steep tuition. While spending money on a top-notch education is just about the smartest investment a person can make, there’s no reason to sink a ton of money into the physical equipment that comes with it.

In other words, you’ll own your education forever. You won’t, however, need to own the books that helped you get it.

A smart alternative is rentals. Here’s why:

  • No need to worry about buying an edition of a textbook that can’t be sold back.
  • No need to pay for the premium of ownership.
  • The ability to easily update from an obsolete edition to the current textbook needed.
  • No need to spend hours at a bookstore, trying to figure out what you need.
  • Access to smart, intuitive customer service.
  • Access to a comprehensive inventory of the latest editions of most textbooks.
  • No need to try and sell back books at the end of the semester.
  • Discounted prices, compared to book store listings.

So let’s take a look at two companies who are helping students save in Waco, Austin, and beyond. Campusbookrentals.com and collegebookrenter.com both make it easy to rent textbooks with a suite of benefits and features, including:

  • Free shipping, both when you receive the textbook, and when it’s time to return it. This saves you time spent wandering the bookstore, money spent on buying a book from a site like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and back-end costs that you might forget about on the return. You’d even save on gas money spent getting to a library.
  • Risk-free refunds, if you drop the class, or it turns out you either got the wrong book, or you got a book listed in the syllabus that you don’t really need.
  • Flexibility to extend rental periods, which gives you peace of mind should your needs for the book change over time. And if you decide you just want to keep it forever, both companies make it easy to simply pay the difference.
  • Permission to still highlight important information in books (both companies ask renters to do so carefully, and only for important information).
  • No monthly membership fees.

There’s just no reason to lose money on worthless textbooks anymore.

Comments are closed.