Tobin Van Ostern | T-VO It: The Blog

At the beginning of school, there are already enough costs to deal with.  Food, housing, and tuition are at the forefront of college costs.  Over the past decades, however, the price of textbooks has been dramatically increasing.

Some classes require numerous novels, others require textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars.  The problem is that most of these books you will never need past the semester and if you try to sell them back when done using them to a street vendor it will often be at a price less than 10% of what you originally paid for it.  Here is a great way to save money and avoid following the old system.

First off, don’t buy textbooks from the official bookstore, these are extremely overpriced.  At the very least, buy them online through amazon.com or something similar.

A better option, however, is to merely rent the textbook for the semester!  This means that you pay a fee to rent the book (typically under 50% of the actual cost of the book) and at the end of the semester you mail it back in (if you fail to mail or return the book, or if you find the book useful and want to keep it you can then buy it at the full price).

The website I use for this is Chegg.

Check it out, see what you think.  Here are some additional features of Chegg.

• For every book you rent, Chegg plants a single tree to further your paper savings.
• Chegg pays the full shipping cost for returning your books.
• You can sell books you no longer use back to Chegg.
• Every semester, chegg has a wider range of books to rent out.

So what are you waiting for?  Look up some of your textbooks, see how much you can save and rent them for the semester.  Chegg.