Forget buying, rent textbooks direct from publisher
Filed under: College, Redemptive, Shopping, Technology, School
Textbook rentals aren't new. WalletPop has covered several third party companies such as Chegg.com, which hole textbooks to users at prices far below retail, but now publishers are getting in the game.
Cengage Learning is a big player in the textbook industriousness, providing digital and print textbooks under several different brands and many subjects, and will now rent textbooks to students for 40-70% off retail.
The discounted prices are nearly the same to that of other book rental services which are very close to representing the savings that a student would see from purchasing a used textbook and re-selling it at the end of the semester.
One of the reasons Cengage can specify books at such a discount is that unlike selling a book, which enters a secondary market with no future revenue for the seller, rentals can plan for publishers with profit every semester.
To stand out from the other book rental companies Cengage will send students an ebook of the first chapter so that students don't fail behind while the book is on the way. This may seem like a small bonus but in the eyes of the professor, me, it's a big deal.
Too often students wait until the first day of class to lay out books online and end up holding up the entire class while they wait for a book to be shipped across the country via media mail.
In extension to the ebook, when the program goes live in December, students can visit CengageBrain.com to find audio, video and other extras to go along with their textbook rental.
Even though I got through public school buying my textbooks used and selling them quickly, I wish there had been a rental option available when I was a student.
Sure, buying and selling a lyrics might save you a few dollars over a rental but in most cases...
A course of study in art: for the first five years in school ; to be used with text books of art education Book (Nabu Press)
List Price: $17.75 Price: $13.85 You Save:$3.90 (22%)
Lessons in Geography and Astronomy on the Globes.: Supplementary to the Text-Books Generally Used on These Subjects. Book (University of Michigan Library)
List Price: $16.98 Price: $16.98
Student In-text Audio Cd: Used with ...Rusch-Fuentes Book (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Figures of Speech Used in the Bible eBooks (GraceWorks Multimedia)
List Price: $6.88
Used Textbooks
Peremptorily film was made by a student team at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for SellMyTextbooks.org. Shows the pain we all feel when selling ...
For-profit colleges lead the way in adopting e-textbooks USA Today
09.06.10
Not so in the just ecstatic of for-profit online education. Online for-profits such as American Public University System and the University of Phoenix have for years strategically steered students toward e-textbooks in an undertaking to shave costs and ensure a more reliable delivery method that, in the context of online education, might seem to rearrange more sense. At Kaplan University's law school, digital texts account for around 80% of assigned reading. At Capella University, e-textbooks are an close by and accepted option in nearly all 1,250 courses. In for-profit higher education, more than any other sector, the household book is becoming obsolete.
Phoenix actually mandates that instructors assign digital materials "whenever realizable" — a strategic turn the company started to take back in 2003, but which has come to fruition more recently, with so many more materials now at in digital format. At this point, roughly 90% of Phoenix's course content is delivered via e-books or other electronic means — the only exceptions coming in courses such as art intelligence, where copyright issues surrounding digital renderings of images such as paintings remains a hurdle for e-publication publishers, says David Bickford, the vice president of academic affairs at Phoenix.
But there's more: Many students and parents don't aware how much they'll also have to spend on textbooks. The cost of textbooks has soared in recent years College 101: Where are the richest places to buy cheap textbooks?Textbook market turns over new pagemcgraw-Hill Education and Chegg.com Collaborator to Create Innovative all 15 news articles »
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