Rent-a-Textbook
The cycle goes something like this: textbook companies make a lot of money selling books to college students, used bookstores cut in on profits by buying and selling these books to students, textbook companies raise prices to recoup profits and publish new editions every year attempting to muscle out the used book market. But, then enter the internet . . . where alas information yearns to be free (yet is often frequently held in chains). Earlier this year The Chronicle reported on Textboook Torrents a site which sought to liberate information from the textbook industry and supply it free (illegally) to students, to which the publishers responded by issuing legal notices to get the site taken down.
Never fear poor students . . .the internet has responded and now you can Rent-a-Textbook. This seems to me to be a better option than torrenting, not only because it is legal but because you get the physical copy. (I’ll admit the user interface on a book is pretty good, preferable in many cases. When was the last time your book ran out of batteries?) I am sure the cat and mouse game of textbook publishers and exploits will continue for quite some time, but ultimately this information is going to follow the music model and get really cheap (think iTunes). Let’s just hope the textbook industry learns faster than the RIAA. (Okay, probably won’t happen but here’s hoping.)
(thanks to @dancohen for tweeting about this)
December 21st, 2008 at 2:14 am
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned them, but Chegg.com lets you rent textbooks and then plants a tree each time you do. I used their services last year around this time for a course and, aside from issues sending the book back (you need a laser printer to print their return label), they were great.
December 28th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Any thoughts on how this applies to distance learning? A huge cost for DL reuse of the textbooks. If we take an image from a text then essentially the students must own the text. If we rent the image and take down the course at the end of the year we could really drive down costs for a course - I think…
January 6th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Yes, I’ve also heard that Chegg.com plants a tree for every book you rent, which is a happy bonus. I’m always on board with any plan to thwart the textbook publishers, whether there’s tree planting involved or not.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Chegg and other textbook rentals seem like a good deal, until you check their pricing and find that the costs are similar to that of purchasing a new text and there are additional charges if you need to keep the book for, say, an additional week (for Finals), which puts the price at that or above the textbook price. I was willing to give Chegg a shot when my college freshman son and I got online to order his books — but, frankly, the cost and convenience of buying books from the University bookstore beat Chegg all to hell.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:36 am
I’ve come to believe that the traditional textbook cultivates a very passive relationship with knowledge. Students anticipate the use of a textbook in any course. A book that is essentially somebody else’s aggregate of the particular subject. This is convenient but also very concerning. Particularly in relation to a students sense of agency and curiosity around any particular subject. In addition to a boring presentation of content, this robs the student of the opportunity to be a hunter gatherer of information - and to dig deeper into contexts that may not even be spoken to in a particular textbook. This is why I advocate the use of social bookmarks as a mandatory component of my courses. Many students resent being asked to find course related information - they say that’s my job. Again, this is the result of years of conditioning to be passive consumers of knowledge and information. I’m not suggesting that our students are not, by nature, curious. But that it’s been worn out of them by a traditional model of knowledge that reinforces transmission over transformation.
January 17th, 2009 at 5:58 am
I still have stacks of text books lying around that I rarely use anymore, I’ve been thinking about renting them out to students in my local area (probably for free). I was going to post them on rentnotbuy.org, or one of the site like it. Has anyone tried that? It might save some local student a few bucks…