In theory I am all for renting college textbooks as opposed to buying them.
This is especially a good idea if the books are for your students classes that they don't think they will need ever again as a reference material in their college career or out in the working world.
College textbooks are insanely expensive today! I haven't bought a college textbook since 1981, and I about dropped a rectal plate when #1 son handed me the price list of the books he needed last fall for his freshman courses.
So we explored buying used textbooks and even buying them used, can cost a whole lot of money.
And they go out of date so quickly too. Companies will release new editions of a book after changing small amounts of information in them. This makes the last edition of the book basically worthless and most college bookstores will NOT even buyback the book. You are stuck with a heavy, expensive paperweight in these cases. All those newer editions just so publishing companies can produce/sell more books. It keeps students from recycling their books and gobbles up natural resources to print more and more books and we are left with a growing problem of what to do with all those old textbooks.
So when I heard about renting college textbooks as opposed to buying them, I was all over that concept!
It's brilliant really.....rent your books for cheap & turn them in to be re-rented by someone else for the next semester.
Lower amount of money out of pocket and no books to have to resell or otherwise dispose of when you are done with them!
So we decided to rent #1 son's college books his first semester in college.
That was a good thing.
We decided to rent them from a company called CHEGG.
That was a very bad thing!
I was so glad when it finally came to a close in March of 2010.
Please, do NOT use them. Use anybody else, just not this one!
They sent 3 shipments total, because of books that never arrived the 1st time or in some cases even the 2nd time. We live in eastern PA and had the books delivered to #1 son's dorm in western PA. I spent hours on the phone trying to trace these book shipments over the course of a month. 1 shipment of books was delivered finally....to an address in eastern NEW JERSEY! Another shipment of a book was mailed for delivery with NO STREET ADDRESS.....just #1 son's name, the town, state and zip code.
I come to find out later that this company does not always have the books you order so they buy them off of other sellers, like from private sellers on Amazon.com. So not only are you at the mercy of the company(a middleman really)you are renting the book from, but you are at the mercy of the seller who is supplying the book for Chegg to you. If that seller Chegg buys your book from is clueless about how to properly ship something(the guy who shipped a book with no street address), YOU bear the brunt of it.
I fought with this company over a book that was ordered 3 times and was NEVER delivered. They claim it was delivered. Yes, it arrived at the University(to their mail room were somebody signed for it and then either misdelivered it or never delivered it via the on-campus mail system)but in the end, my son never got the book. The incompetence of college mail systems is yet another problem and a reason not to have rented books sent directly to your school, especially a large public university. But I digress....
So I paid over $55 to rent a book that never arrived, plus #1 son had to go out and buy this book for $65+. Then Chegg expected me to return said book-which #1 son never got-when I returned the rest of the books at the end of the semester. Since we don't have said book, they said I had to buy the book and tried to charge me for the cost of the book.
I don't think so!
In the end, this company did me the favor of dropping the charges that I owed them for the book that never arrived.
So nice of them, wasn't it?
Perhaps I should have sent them the bill for the blood pressure pills I needed after I started dealing with them....
After this fiasco Hubs is dead set against renting textbooks again...EVER!...from Anyone! So we are stuck with buying...used at least, whenever possible.
Unless of course the college goes to in-house rentals or eBooks or Kindle books.
I think that would be a good thing.
Do you have a college student?
What are your textbooks costs like? We got off easy this semester for ONLY $515!
Have you rented textbooks? Who did you use and what was your experience like?
Leave a comment!
Sluggy
We have been usng Chegg for two years. We have never had a problem with them. We will only buy a new textbook if it can't be rented.
ReplyDeleteWow! What a nightmare! Heeding your advice!
ReplyDeleteI was taking a psychology course to renew my teaching certificate, but the book was $110, new.Since this was the first year for this edition, there were no used ones to be had. I bought the earlier edition by advertising far and wide on a Trader group...yahoo, I believe. I found a book for $10 about 40 miles away. I knew where the Walmart was and she was going shopping. So, a friend drove me there. I jumped from his vehicle, traded a $10 for the book as she sat in traffic in the parking lot. It turned out my book was two pages off but the text, as far as we could see, was identical. Old editions are not necessarily much different from the latest edition. However, I might not advise this for a freshman. I don't think I would rent a text. I want the right to write freely in a book.
ReplyDeleteBarnes and Noble is now selling used and renting textbooks. I would trust them more than a company I had not heard of.
ReplyDeleteIf I were paying for textbooks, it would be the cheapest way I could get them.
I was an English major, so I had it a lot easier than most people. Most of the books I needed were novels that I bought for cheap off Amazon or even got for free from the library.
ReplyDeleteHowever, when I did need to buy actual textbooks for my general education courses (I still had to take math, science, history, ect...) I only bought used or rented from Chegg. I never had much problem with Chegg at all, but sometimes the books did come a little later than I needed them. One thing I did was share a book with a girl who lived down the hall. It was $60, so we split the cost and shared the book. It's not a system that works for everyone though.
Our college is looking into providing students with ipads fully loaded with ebooks of their classes. The students, of course, will pay a fee for the ipad (probably added into their tuition) and then will rent access to the ebooks through the bookstore based on which textbooks they need. We still don't have all the kinks worked out yet...but our goal is to start this by Fall 2011. It is ridiculous how much textbooks cost; but the information changes so much year after year that it is necessary to change the editions as well. We're hoping that the ebooks option will make it easier on the students and more cost efficient for everyone. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteThat is a nightmare!! I like the idea of ebooks myself. It would solve a lot of problems. We paid $159 in book rentals and the school takes care of it so I'm not going to complain about that. There are plenty of other things for me to complain about!
ReplyDelete