With enrollment fees increasing and financial aid becoming more difficult to acquire, hope for students can be found in textbook rentals.
Companies such as BookRenter and Chegg offer several book titles at less than half the cost of purchasing them.
“After all, we rent tuxedos, we rent DVDs, we rent tons of stuff that’s not efficient to own, or that we need to use only once,” said Aayushi Phrumbhra and Osman Rashid co-founders of the Chegg Web site. “So why not rent textbooks?”
According to the Chegg Web site, the two-year-old company along with providing students textbooks at half the price of books in retail stores, also encourages environmental awareness by reusing books.
The company is linked with “Global Releaf,” an American forest education and action program that has a tree planted for every book that is rented.
Chegg reports that it has contributed to an estimated 850 acres of trees since the company started operation.
BookRenter, a three-year-old textbook rental company promotes recycling paper.
According to the BookRenter Web site “on average a book is reused five times, and by renting textbooks BookRenter decreases demand for virgin fiber paper, paper specially made for textbooks.”
Both Web sites offer quick and painless procedures to rent textbooks.
Simply inputting an author’s name, or title of the desired textbook into the Web site’s search bar has students prepared for class.
A biology textbook that costs more than $100 at the EC bookstore was $20 on the Chegg Web site.
“I’ve been stressing out about not having the money to buy my books yet, but now I’m glad I’ve been holding off,” Andrew Avila, 21 music major, said.
One of the major concerns with using textbooks rentals is how long a book can be distribtuted.
Both Web sites have their own limitations on how long a student can rent textbooks, but both Web sites allow students to rent textbooks for a maxium of 125 days.
Renting textbooks not only decreases textbook costs, students won’t have to worry about waiting in long lines or selling books back afterward.
“That’s a amazing idea. I’m definitely going to consider renting books next semester; because since the prices went up, I spent over three-hundred dollars for the books I needed,”Veronica Gonzalez, 23 history major, said.