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In our neck of the woods school started back this week. With that brings the lovely expense of buying books for older kids. One option you may not have thought of though is renting textbooks. If you know they are taking a low level class and are never going to want to keep the book you might really want to look into this.
Behind the scenes of Southern Savers I have a few college students that come and help with all kinds of things, so we were researching how to save and came across the idea of renting your books. There are three main websites that do this and they all creamed the local bookstore price handsdown.
Here’s a rundown of the three sites:
- BookRenter.com allows you to rent for a full or partial semester. They also offer free shipping both ways! Use code TT5%OFF to get 5% off your total purchase.
- Chegg.com has 130 day rentals (full semester). Shipping is $3.99 for the first book and $2.99 for any others. Use code aff51 to get 5% off your total purchase.
- CollegeBookRenter.com allows full or partial semester rentals. Currently the are offering free shipping through 8/31 and return shipping is always free. Use code SAVEWITHCBR to get 5% off your total purchase.
To give you an idea of the savings:
Fundamentals of Human Resource Management
Purchase New $134
Purchase Used: $95.24
Rental: $42-$53 (after 5% savings)
I know from my experience buying the used version and selling it back later I only got maybe $30-$40 for books (if I was lucky), so to me this comes out to pretty good deal.
As with all online deals, you can even get cash back from your text books! Go through Shopathome.com or Ebates and get between 4% and 7% cash back from the three sites above.
Do you have any other tips or tricks for saving on college text books??
