Yesterday I talked about how I saved money on college textbooks when I was in school.  What this didn’t cover was a new way to get through the semester without paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.  The new and interesting way to get your college textbooks is renting.  There are a few sites but the top two seem to be Chegg.com and CampuBookRentals.com.

The concept for both of these sites is very simple.  You rent your books for a semester instead of buying them.  This concept should work very well for anyone who is taking electives or classes that are not going to be built upon in later coursework (ex. Calculus 1 followed by Calculus 2 would probably use the same book).  The prices can be extremely low and in many instances this may be the best option.

One stipulation to watch out for is if you can purchase a used book or one for much less off of the Internet you do have the option of selling those books to a student or back to the campus bookstore.  Make sure you take this into account when deciding which option is the better deal.

In searching for different books through their site they are fairly competitive.  Chegg seems to have the lower price about 75% of the time but CampusBookRentals is usually right there or lower.  Both give you the option of searching by ISBN which means you can get the exact version you want without having to look through a list of similar books.

For specific uses this is a great way to save a ton on your college textbooks.