Way back in 1998, I started college. In 2005, I went again. Both times, I was completely in awe at the outrageous cost of textbooks. If you were lucky, you could find a used copy that would be a little bit cheaper, but more often than not you'd end up having to buy a brand new one at an exorbitant price. And then there are those classes that had not one, not two, but three or four or five books (plus optional reads...yea, right) for you to buy. And $500 later you'd be set for the semester, only to start all over again when new classes started. Times 8 semesters. That is a lot of money. Even worse? Most likely you are never going to use them again. Ever.
(side note: I still have old textbooks in my parents' basement. At Christmas my family does this thing called the Yankee Swap where you take some of your worst junk and wrap it up and draw numbers to pick a present out of the pile. There's trading and gift stealing and lots of laughs over who has the worst junk. Anyway, last year, I wrapped up my Fitness for Life textbook, happy to send it on its way. I ended up getting it back. Seriously. So I took it to the dump, figuring someone might want to read it?)
Now, I know some of you are in college, taking classes, getting your learning on. Or maybe your're sending your own kids to college. And I'm sure that either way, you are buying some outrageously expensive books. There is a really neat option for you to look into: CampusBookRentals. This site is so ingenious. You search for your books, pay a reasonable rental fee, use the book, and then return it when you're done. Renting textbooks! It's a pretty genius idea.
Some perks of renting your books? You can save 40-90% off of bookstore prices (that's a lot), you get free shipping both ways, there are flexible renting periods for odd semester lengths, and you get to shop from the comfort of your own home instead of standing in bookstore lines during the height of the book-buying season. You can even highlight in the textbooks you rent.
Why choose CampusBookRentals in particular? In addition to having an easy site to navigate, they've partnered with Operation Smile, an organization that performs life changing cleft lip surgeries on children whose families could not otherwise afford it. The long term improvement in quality of life for the children that receive these surgeries is almost incomprehensible. CampusBookRentals donates money for every textbook rented, and they are donating over 1,000 life saving cleft lip surgeries this year to children in need.
You can check out how it works here:
They also have a sister program called RentBack. RentBack is new initiative that allows students to rent the textbooks they own to other students, which is neat because you could end up with two to four times more money compared to what you'd make through buyback options at your campus bookstore!
If you're in need of textbooks, you should definitely go check out their site. It could really save you time and money.
**This is a sponsored post on behalf on CampusBookRentals,
but I do think this is a really awesome idea because textbooks are so unbelievably expensive.**
**The winner of the Hooked by Amber giveaway is Allie! Congrats, Allie! I'll be in touch!**
nice advice! I actually have kept most of my physics undergrad books. I needed them for graduate school. Since Ryan is in a ph.d program he also uses them from time to time so I think we'll have a lot of physics books around the house for a while.
ReplyDeleteRead about this service elsewhere, or maybe even in an earlier post of yours? Think it's a massively great idea. Remember the eye-watering prices my law course daughter had to pay for her text-books, some of them real door-stoppers too! Think she still has most of them, but, alas, law texts tend to be out of date within the life of someone's course, if not annually!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
Isobel: www.ColdhamCuddliescalling.blogspot.com
I still have 900 leftover textbooks, too. The ones I'm getting now for interior design are at least smaller and more practical for actual use in the field, but the books I got for my first degree are just in a huge box in the closet. Too bad I didn't know about this service back then!
ReplyDeleteWow, campusbookrentals sounds like an awesome idea! I'll let my nephew know - he just started college. Wish I had that when I was in college!!
ReplyDeleteWow, I wish they had this when I went to college! Books are so expensive and it's not even funny. Then you try to sell it back and they tell you tough luck because they came out with a new edition...ugh!
ReplyDeleteAnd the Operation Smile is such a wonderful cause!