With college students spending an average of $628 to $1,471 on textbooks every year, it’s no wonder why you’re interested in cheaper options than buying your books every semester. Luckily, the textbook rental process is just as easy as purchasing your books.
Over the next few minutes, we’ll get into the details about this budget-friendly way to get textbooks and the best way to get ahold of them in time for class.
Better For Your Budget
Depending on your major in college, a typical textbook can be close to or just over $100. This is usually the case in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) textbooks, which are more expensive for the sheer amount and quality of content shoved into each new addition. Also, these classes tend to require an access code with the textbook, which adds a few bucks to the purchase.
Renting your textbooks can be done for a fraction of the price. Whether you compare prices yourself or let BookScouter do it, you’ll find that renting a textbook easily cuts the price in half. Rather than paying $100 for a book you’ll only use for a semester, you might find renting to be closer to $40 through your campus bookstore or another vendor.
No Resell Stress
Whether you’re on the quarter, semester, or trimester system, you’ll be using your textbooks for a few months at most. Those textbooks may sit on a shelf in your dorm for those few months, or you might lug them to the library to do homework and study.
But when the term ends, what’s next? You’ll find that campus buyback programs give you pennies on the dollar for your original price. So you can either pack away a bunch of textbooks you’ll never use again or lose money by reselling. What is the best way to avoid that stress? Rent your textbooks. You only have to worry about remembering to return them in time.
Cheaper Access to Updated Content
You don’t need to know the ins and outs of the publishing industry to know that new editions of textbooks are frequently released. In many fields, there are legitimate reasons for these updates. For example, a statistics course would greatly benefit from updated real-world data sets to work with.
But new editions are also a publishing trick to ensure sales and increase prices. By the time you’re done with the class, the edition you used will probably only be around for another term or two before the professor requires a newer edition. Rather than paying hundreds of dollars for the newest textbook edition, you can rent those same editions for a fraction of the cost.
Save the Earth
While eco-friendly choices aren’t always the most cost-effective, renting your textbooks saves money and helps conservation efforts. As stated, renting your textbooks is much cheaper than outright buying them. Renting also allows for reusing textbooks, decreasing the demand for new textbooks to be printed.
With fewer textbooks being printed, less paper is required. So while you’re saving money, you’re also saving trees! Even if environmentally friendly options aren’t at the top of your priority list while you’re in school, consider this a perk of your textbook rentals.
Don’t Waste Time Comparing Prices
As a college student, time is of the essence. You need to cram in classes, homework, and study time on top of all the tasks and responsibilities of being an adult. For example, finding time to eat, exercise, socialize, and get enough sleep while staying on top of your classes is a huge leap in time management after high school.
Which is why you don’t need to be wasting time comparing textbooks prices between bookstores and online vendors. When you rent rather than buy, you already know that the price you’re getting is much lower than what they’d outright sell the textbook for. And with a site like BookScouter, comparing rental options takes a few seconds rather than however much time you’d waste researching it.
BookScouter
We’ve gone on and on about why renting textbooks is a better option than purchasing them, but we’ve only lightly touched on a great way to find a textbook rental. BookScouter is the most convenient and easiest way to compare textbook rental prices.
In a single search, you’ll enter the ISBN number of whatever textbooks you need for your class, and BookScouter instantly pulls up the best rental offer. With over 20 rental vendors, you have a wide variety to choose from. BookScouter is also transparent about customer reviews for each vendor, so after you compare the rental prices, you can determine for yourself if you trust the vendor. This site is built to help college students save money and get tips and tricks for their time in college.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, you know that renting textbooks is an easy way to save money in college. Instead of buying the newest edition of a textbook only to have trouble selling it later, renting textbooks takes away the stress of reselling and losing money.
Along with being a cheaper alternative to the same content you’d get with purchasing, renting a textbook is better for the environment and saves you time. Rather than sifting through sites on your own to compare prices, you can use BookScouter to compare prices with a single search. All while saving the trees!
