How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks - Bucks Blog. Updated | August 11, 2010 You might call it the college student’s first lesson in exploitation: paying $100 for a textbook, then getting a mere $12 when reselling to the campus bookstore at the end of the semester.
College textbook prices rose about 6 percent, on average, every year — that’s twice the rate of inflation — from 1986 to 2004. And there’s nothing more infuriating than paying the sticker price on textbooks (well, with the exception of tuition itself), when many other books are available at a discount. The cost of buying the textbooks can easily add up to $1,000 a year or more. College Textbooks in Online Format made affordable. Conn. publisher says it will rent textbooks to college students. STAMFORD, Conn. - A college textbook publisher said yesterday it would become the first to rent titles directly to students, another option for those who are fed up with spending $100 or more to buy books they have little use for after a semester.
Cengage Learning, based in Stamford, Conn., said its rentals would cost 40 percent to 70 percent less than the suggested retail price. Several hundred titles will be available in December, with more to follow next July. Students may already rent textbooks, usually second-hand, through websites such as Chegg.com and Bookrenter.com, but publishers are largely cut out of that market.
Publishers say a major reason their prices sometimes reach three figures is that the initial sale is their only chance to collect revenue.