College Basics’ mission is to help students get into college and have a successful experience. So…we’re always looking for ways college students can earn their credits but still save themselves money. Avoiding large college debt means you have a more valuable degree when you have finished your college years.
Aside from tuition and room and board, a large and unavoidable cost for students is buying their textbooks each semester. Today’s texts are expensive; one can cost hundreds of dollars. Multiply that by 5 (courses per semester) and then again by 8 (semesters in four years). Phew!
There are sensible ways to cut down text book costs. College Basics has written about buying used and reselling texts, but now we’ve found an online site that helps you do both and offers a third very viable alternative—renting.
BookRenter.com is a very easy-to-use site that offers you up-to-date texts for rent. You rent a book, use it—even being able to highlight it for your own personal study needs, and return it while saving about 80% of your textbook costs. At BookRenter you can search for a text by its ISBN, by title, or by author. BookRenter offers you quality books with a guarantee of satisfaction or your money back for any reason within 21 days of receipt, and they can ship you a replacement. BookRenter has access to 5 million texts from over 560 stores and is also directly affiliated with campus book stores across the country. That means you can actually deal with BookRenter online or right through your own participating campus bookstore so you can get exactly what you need.
On top of this easy accessibility to quality texts, you can get next-day-delivery, and you can return your books when you’re finished by UPS for free. If you might need to extend your rental time, you can do so for the same rate as you are presently paying, and you can even buy the book you’ve been renting—just in case you get very attached to it—for purchase price or less.
You can get other textbook deals at BookRenter for the same service and guarantees.
Buy new – The prices are competitive for new texts because BookRenter deals with so many distributors in such volume (6 million students) digitally.
Buy used – All those new rented texts come back used and are for sale. You can save 50% to 80 % of your costs buying used, and sometimes BookRenter will even give you a new book for the used price.
Sell your textbooks – BookRenter also needs used texts. They offer fair prices, and you can send your texts to BookRenter via the same free UPS service BookRenter offers its other customers.
College Basics likes BookRenter for all these reasons and more. We like the fact BookRenter is environmentally conscious. We also think their discounts and offers for additional 5% to 10% savings via their email sign-up means additional value. And, BookRenter even has scholarship competitions worth as much as $25,000.
Today college students need to look for savings while they study. Textbook savings can be considerable. Do you really want to lug around heavy texts for the next twenty years because you bought them and don’t feel like throwing them away? Do you want to buy a text, thinking you can resell it, only to find out a new edition has come out and your text is out-of-date? Do you believe that your money is best spent on texts that change every semester when you can rent them as you need them?
You have other options; check them out.
