Renting Textbooks

Waste Prevention Forum
October 5, 2009

From Terry Foecke, Materials Productivity LLC, St. Paul, MN, in response to the 8/26/09 items about textbooks:
Our daughter is renting three expensive textbooks from http://www.Chegg.com this coming semester, and I can offer some insight into the textbook "ecosystem" that is developing in response to extremely high prices at the college bookstore.
First, while Chegg.com can definitely be a good deal, it might be best to think of it as guaranteed re-sale (they pay return postage) because of the way the pricing works.  Buying new at the best price available + selling back is only about 20-30% more expensive than renting from Chegg.  But if you rent from Chegg instead of buying at the college bookstore, even with re-sale, you will save a good amount.

But that's not a realistic comparison.  Using http://www.campusbooks.com (I have no relationship; I just like it) you can input ISBNs for every textbook and get back tables showing prices for new, used, rental, on-line auctions and e-books.  Now that was a revelation!  Finally there is a way to not just buy at good prices but also optimize for re-use.  No longer are you limited to whatever used copies happen to be available on campus.  And if a student can time their re-sale so that they are selling in August instead of May, and search for buyers through Campusbooks, even more used copies will be in circulation - and you'll get better re-sale prices.  With 4 hours work our daughter saved $360 on one semester's books, all in.
I'm not sure how textbook publishers are going to make money going forward if they have to rely on selling new textbooks.  Maybe that's why e-books are picking up steam.  But all of this is a very nice development in terms of waste reduction.
E-mail:  tfoecke@matprod.com