Cheap Textbooks Online

But bear in mind that sometimes you can't sell a book back. If a new edition is coming out, if the book is seriously damaged, or for no obvious reason, a site may refuse to purchase the one you own. Cheap textbook rentals sites seem less forgiving of damage or heavy writing or highlighting but some charge fees if you return the book in worse condition.

A blogger at Debtfreescholar.com writes that major cheap textbooks online rental sites, such as BookRenter.com, CampusBookRentals.com, and Chegg.com, sell new and used textbooks at 50% to 85% off list price. ECampus.com claims that it shaves 20% to 50% off the retail price, while CampusBooks.com reports a whopping 95% discount in some cases. At Textbooks.com, for example, you can buy a new copy of Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism for $178.92, the highest price for this book we could find; used, the book costs $127.80. Renting the same book from Chegg.com for $77.49 would save you heaps. In looking at prices for new books alone, CampusGrotto.com found the cheapest textbook rentals at Chegg.com and the cheapest textbooks purchase prices at Bookbyte.com.

Cheap Textbooks Shipping.

On-time delivery matters in this business because you typically need your books the day the course starts. Most cheap college textbook websites use third-party sellers to expand their lists of titles, which means you might receive shipments at different times. This may not matter if you plan and order ahead, but if it's the week before class starts, you could be out of luck. Although TextbooksRUs.com earns high marks from Campus Grotto for selling new books cheaply, several students posting on Epinions report that their orders did not arrive on time, and sometimes not at all.

It's also worth checking if the potential site charges to send books back, regardless of the reason. CampusBookRentals.com, for instance, has a 30-day risk-free returns policy (if you haven't damaged the book); most other sites we researched have similar rules.