Now You Can Rent Text Books Online, Awesome!

Posted on by Forest in Saving Money & Finances

My girlfriend just emailed off her, hopefully, final draft of her Masters thesis a few hours ago. To say she is excited and worried about what comes next is an understatement. All these years of study and all these years of building up student debt and now she has to find a way to use her qualifications for something she’ll enjoy and pay all that cash back.

I won’t go into details about how much she is in debt but it would be a fair thing to say that a large amount of money during her 6 years of study since the beginning of undergrad has been spent on text-books. I never attended college so you can imagine how far my jaw dropped when I started to find out how much these things cost.

Every student HAS to get the book for the courses in order to complete them, doesn’t that make college some kind of marketing scheme? Surely they must be making deals in the backgrounds with the publishers to use certain books in their courses?

The thing is it stinks, it stinks big time.

One relief from paying full price has been the ability for students to purchase used college books from campus book stores and sometimes borrow them from college or well-stocked city libraries. The problem is popular books are near-on impossible to find using this method.

But, the world is a smaller place now and the internet has brought together enough of a system that students can now save an absolute bucket load of cash by 1) buying college books online at a discount price 2) buying use college books online and easily obtaining them 3) Just renting the book for the needed duration and returning at the end of the rental term.

One such place the provides all three of these services is eCampus and they have asked me to take a quick look over their service and tell my readers about it.

What is eCampus?

As I mentioned it is a website that mainly deals with the selling of new, used and rental of academic based text books. It provides all these services at a discount price and does it’s business via mail. They seem to have also branched out into eBooks, standard books DVD & BluRay and even college clothing. There is also an option to sell any old text books you have to them too.

How much would I expect to pay to buy new, used or rent a text-book?

For me the option that makes the most sense is renting a text book for the term or semester you need it for. Picking a random book, Campbell Biology : Concepts and Connections, the pricing is as follows:

• Buy New: $174.07
• Buy Used: $ 122.29
• Rent semester: $57.50 (shorter rental times are not much cheaper in this case).

How long does it take to get the books?

Generally it seems that the books are shipped within 24-48 hours in most cases.

How do I sell them my text books?

Simple, you go to their sell books tab and enter the ISBN’s of your books into their quote system. They send you a quote and you can print off a free shipping label and send them off. On verification they will send you the cash, brilliant! I wish my girlfriend had done this!

My general impressions…

I must state I have not purchased anything from the site but looking at it, it is very well laid out, extremely easy to use and the savings with renting are clear. I can’t imagine you’ll have any problems finding the majority of books you need and with the ever-growing eBook option it means that you can get books instantly more and more often.

For students on a budget this is definitely the way forward.

Have you used this or a similar service before? How did you find it and would you recommend it as an alternate to paying for new books from the campus store?

You may be interested in our related post about Graduating College With Zero Debt.

Review on behalf of eCampus.

Tags: college, for ecampus, renting text books, text book rental