4 Ways to Get Cheaper Textbooks for College

College textbooks are expensive. Stupid expensive. Some books top out at around $200 these days. In fact, the price of textbooks has risen at twice the rate of inflation and four times as fast as median household incomes over the past 20 years. The average student will spend almost $1,000 on textbooks this year. And they’ll maybe get $100 when they sell them back to the bookstore. Want to avoid getting ripped off? There are four ways for getting textbooks at much lower prices if you’re willing to rent them or go digital.

1. Rent textbooks

Why pay $100 for a book that you’re going to use for three months and never open again? Instead, consider renting your textbooks. There are several online textbook rental businesses that allow you to pay a lower price to rent a book, use for the time you need it, and mail it back when you’re done.

Two popular textbook rental websites are Chegg, which supposedly has over 6 million books to chose from, and BookRenter, which has 5 million. Both websites offer 21-day money-back guarantees and cover your return shipping if you use their preprinted label. The downside is that you have to be careful with marking up the books with note and highlights. BookRenter doesn’t have an issue with it, but Chegg does.

To find the cheapest rental prices for your books, check out Alibris Textbooks, Textbook Rentals, or RentScouter. Just enter the author, title, or ISBN of the book and you’ll get a slew of options based on price, length of rental, purchase price, and whether the book is physical or digital.

2. Buy digitalized textbooks

Speaking of digital textbooks, those versions cost less — and weigh less — than physical versions. If you own an eReader, like a Kindle or a NOOK, or a tablet, like an iPad, Touchpad, or Xoom, you can buy full-on digitalized copies of books that are starting to really look and function like the real thing. You can buy them from the big boys, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or from less-known sources such as Kno and CourseSmart.

Barnes & Noble’s NOOKStudy app for PC and Mac can save you up to 60 percent on textbooks. The tablet free iPad app Kno gives you access to over 100,000 digitalized textbooks that are 30 to 50 percent off retail price. And Kno comes with an awesome note taking “Journal” feature that blows the competition away. The best part? Kno is on the cloud, which means you can access your textbook from any device that can get online with a browser that supports HTML5. CourseSmart, a collaboration between several textbook publishing giants like McGraw Hill and Pearson, can save you 60 percent over retail, has an offline reading feature, and allows you to print out 10 pages at a time.

3. Rent Digitalized Textbooks

You can also rent digitalized textbooks. Amazon, for example, offers digitalized rentals that can be read on any device — PC, Mac, smartphone, etc. — that can connect to the internet. Certain books can be rented for up to 80 percent off for the minimum rental period of 30 days. As a bonus, any notes and highlights you make on Amazon rentals are accessible after the rental period ends.

4. Buy only the chapters you need

For those of you upset at the prospect of shelling out big bucks for a book from which a professor has assigned maybe just one or two chapters — it happens a lot — Inkling, a digital textbook designer and distributor, may have just the thing for you. Inkling allows you to pay for certain eTextbooks by the chapter. If you’re thinking of going digital this semester, check your course syllabus before you spend a bunch of coin on an entire book to see if you can get away with buying only the chapters you need.

 

Renting physical and digitalized textbooks, buying digitalized textbooks, and buying only the chapters that you need are good ideas for saving big on college textbooks. Have any other good ideas? Share them with us. Who knows, maybe you’ll actually be able to afford an eReader or a tablet with the money you save on buying or renting books for eReaders or tablets. Welcome to circular logic. It’s something you might read more about. In a digitalized textbook.