Back to School – Rent Textbooks Don’t Buy!

How to rent textbooks and save money!

Now that school and college terms will soon be in full swing, it’s time to think of textbooks.

Textbooks can be expensive.   Multiply that by several classes…….

Now that books can be read on electronic readers and tablets, this idea has spread to e-textbooks as well.  You can rent textbooks digitally for a specified period of time at a cost that’s even less than buying a used version!

I’ve listed the 3 main features which are common to nearly all of the options to rent textbooks, and then below that, you will see the main sites which offer this service.

Features and benefits

• You can take notes on, add material to, print from, and otherwise manage course materials of rented textbooks
• You can access your notes even after the rental period is up.
• Most sites provide their own software (mostly free) and you can also view the books on a browser and often on a smartphone.

Rental Sites

There are several options to rent textbooks, including one free service.  Here are the main ones:

The free service is called OverDrive.  You can search for and download e-books in the collections of participating libraries. Some reviewers have found that the selection is not as broad as for the paid options (which is understandable) and there were some issues with downloading.  EcoExpert advice: try this site first, then if you can’t find what you want, look for a paid version.

Barns & Noble Yuzu.  Their software is free to download, and you can try out an e-textbook free for 7 days. Then you pay the rental fees.

CengageBrain relies on e-textbook vendor CourseSmart‘s reader app for Android and iOS devices; you can also read the books in a browser on any computer.

Kno lets you read its e-textbooks in three ways: on an iPad, on the company’s website, or through its Facebook app.

Amazon offers Kindle Textbook Rental. You can read eTextbooks on Kindle of course, but also on Macs, PCs, smartphones and tablets. It offers very flexible options to rent textbooks (any period between 30 and 360 days). Be aware that although Amazon has loads of textbooks, they are not all available for rental – check the “Formats” option.

e-Textbooks save resources (although electronic readers may not, depending on usage), and renting rather than buying can save you money this term!

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