Textbooks are crazy expensive, something I’ve written about before. I recently received an email from the folks at eCampus talking about how renting is a great money-saving option, and they sent me numbers comparing textbook costs under different class-list scenarios. It’s too big to show you a picture, but you can check out the spreadsheet: Mock-Student-Schedule-savings(07252012) (1).
No surprise, they show that renting textbooks saves the most money. And, for the most part, they are probably right, but there are two parts to the analysis that they have overlooked. The first is that anyone renting a textbook or buying a used textbook may have to pay extra for access to online testing and review services offered by the textbook companies. (Access is included with new textbooks.) I’ve found that students keep up with the class better when these services are required, and that might change the math a little.
Second, new books and many used books can be sold back. Now, the resale prices are sometimes comically low and past editions are rarely accepted, but selling books back reduces the total cost. In essence, renting textbooks is the same as buying a book with a guaranteed buy-back, which is worth something.
Usually, I get textbooks for my classes free from the publishers, although many companies are switching to online access for faculty copies. (I prefer that, actually, because otherwise I have too many textbooks cluttering the office.) For the China program, though, I had to buy a textbook to prepare for a class I had not taught before. I bought the book from Amazon, and then I sold it back through BookByte. My net cost worked out to about $50. I took good care of the book, and it was a current edition, so the resale was no problem.
Sometimes students want to buy new textbooks because they want to keep them for future reference. In most cases, these books get lugged around from place to place “just in case” until a spouse puts her foot down and asks for specifics about the last time a differential equations text was opened before she will pay to move it across country for the second time. With few exceptions, no one refers to college textbooks ever again, so don’t make your purchase decision based on that idea.
Textbook costs are killers. Check into the options and see if you can save yourself even a little bit of dough.
Great job putting the rental vs. buying question into some context. I’d agree that there is no universally superior method of obtaining a textbook: it really all depends on some of the scenarios you bring up. We tend look at the situation in two ways. There is the question of net savings, in which we think textbook rentals allow you to save more, on average. And there is also the separate issue of managing one’s cash flow as a student. For the student who is able to rent textbooks instead of buying, they will enjoy the benefit of keeping textbook costs very low at the beginning of the semester, which can sometime require purchasing expensive texts for 3, 4, or even 5 different intro classes, especially during those first two years of college.