To alleviate the escalating cost of textbooks, the BU Barnes &’ Noble now offers an alternative to purchasing textbooks: renting them at half the price.
The BU store will have about 900 different textbooks available to students, including books needed for introductory courses, said BU Barnes &’ Noble manager Steve Turco.
“Students voted that they want lower cost course material so our responsibility is to provide them with what they want,” Turco said. “As a store, we offer multi-channel assortment of options for students in different delivery formats as well as prices &- new, used, digital, rental and value options in order to help impact the cost of course material expenses to the students at BU. So any way you want a book, it’s going to be available.”
But BU is not alone&- starting this fall, Barnes &’ Noble is offering the rental service to about 300 colleges and universities across the state and country, including University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Suffolk University.
According to the BU Barnes &’ Noble website, students are allowed to highlight and write in the rented textbooks and can keep the books up to 10 days after the last day of finals.
The website also states students will be reminded via email about the due dates of their books and can choose to convert the rental into a purchase within the first two weeks.
BU Barnes &’ Noble also offers thousands of eTextbooks, according to an email sent out to BU students earlier this month.
All eTextbooks can be read through free e-Reader programs that are available for PCs or Macs.
In May, Forbes magazine listed college textbooks as one of the 10 ways people are being ripped off, costing the average American student about $900 a year. As a result, some students have opted out of purchasing books on-campus by utilizing book rental sites such as chegg.com and campusbookrentals.com.
Campusbookrentals.com has been in service since 2007 and currently provides books for students on 5,201 campuses, according to its website.
Similarly, with chegg.com, students can rent and return books through the mail. However, chegg.com limits highlighting and doesn’t allow marking up the book.
Some students, like College of Arts and Sciences junior Anupriya Mundra, consider online book providers, such as Amazon.com, a better option.
I don’t know [if I’ll use the service] because Barnes &’ Nobles is five times the price,” she said. “Even if they are renting I don’t know how cheep they are going to be.”
Mundra said she would only borrow textbooks from the BU store if they rent them at a “decent and fair” price.
But others said they are pleased with the new rental policy and will use the BU bookstore because of its convenience.
It’s more cost-efficient for students, especially for classes not in their majors,” said CAS senior Henry Wilder.
So far, Turco said, there have been positive responses to the rental service.
“Students are favorable to the rental option we have available,” he said.
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