Is it Better to Buy Textbooks or Rent Them?

 This is a guest post from bookace:

Is it better to buy textbooks or rent them?

Although a student might at first enjoy the idea of going to college, this soon changes when they have to buy textbooks; most to-be college students looking to buy textbooks have no idea how expensive this can be. Some are known to cost more than $200 themselves! But there IS a way to get cheap textbooks; you can rent them! Students nowadays have access to the facilities needed for renting textbooks for extremely low prices. Renting textbooks can keep you from having to buy textbooks carrying price tags of hundreds of dollars. This is more beneficial than even buying used textbooks as even though the prices of those are low relative to the prices of brand new books, they aren’t so low either.

Renting textbooks is the new trend for saving money in the college society and the number of people doing this keeps increasing every day. Students usually need textbooks only for the duration of the semester. This is where the rental system’s benefit comes in; students can rent textbooks (for a fraction of the price they would have to pay if they buy textbooks) for the duration of the semester and send them back to the company after the semester is over. No worrying about how to resell out of date books.

Here’s the exact procedure of renting textbooks; step one is searching the lenders’ listing to see what books they have available for renting. Any rental company would have a very diverse listing for many subjects. Make sure to compare textbooks with other companies to find the best prices! The next step is to select the time period you want the book for. After you are done with selecting the books and time period, you can actually go ahead and buy textbooks you need- you can use a credit/debit card to pay. The books will arrive in your mail after several days. Once you are done with using them, you can mail them back to the company which will pay for the shipping.

There are lots of websites out there that can lend books to fit whatever course you might be taking. The benefits you receive when you rent over when you buy textbooks are almost endless; you’ll save money, effort and time. It’s also very convenient as you need only a computer with internet to buy textbooks and wherever you have that, you can rent textbooks online; no matter whether it’s your dorm room, home or your seat in a bus with a laptop with you! No queues to wait in and no pushy students or stubborn cashiers to deal with.

There are lots of students from institutions countrywide who rent rather than buy textbooks. This is one reason for those competitive prices. The amount you’ll save per semester can be averaged to about $250, but this can change vastly between colleges, courses and semesters.

So with these in your mind, you can think why you would want to buy textbooks you would be using only for several months rather than rent them anymore, wasting your parents hard earned money.