Textbooks are a massive cost for students. To reduce this cost scholars are looking towards textbook rentals and purchasing used textbooks.  Both can help to save you over half of the price of purchasing your textbooks new.  But which is the better deal?  Here are two proposals to help identify the best trail for taking your university textbooks.

First you must go to a good textbook price comparison site. Enter your required books ISBN or hunt for your book using title and writer.  Now check out the price comparison results.  The results should ideally include both rental costs and used purchase costs.  The rental costs, and shipping if any, represents your total cost of the book.  You pay the money, they ship you the book, and you return it at the end of the rental period.  For the used books listed by the price comparison site the price is your 1st initial cost with the likelihood of recovering some of this cost when you sell your book at the end of the course.  At this primary step if the comparison list shows use textbooks that are less expensive than rental than this is your least expensive option.  If the used books are a touch more than rental you want to judge your potential sell back price which takes us to step 2.

In step 2 we will try and decide the sell back cost of a second user textbook.  Many price comparison sites include a choice to look up current buy back quotes for used textbooks like this. Naturally this is today’s buyback price but unless a new edition comes out you will be able to get about an identical value when it is time to sell your book.  So take the used price minus the buyback quote to get a very good guess on what your overall cost for the book will be.

This is the pricetag you need to compare to the price.  One game changer is if a new edition comes out. This could considerably devalue the buyback potential of the used textbook and makes renting an interesting offer.  One trick is to perform a search for your textbook utilising the title and writer and not the ISBN. This sort of search should return multiple editions of the same textbook.  Now glance at the printed dates of each version and see if you can see a pattern on how frequently a new edition comes out.  Is it each 3 years, 5 years, or some other average cycle.  This info ought to supply you with a hint if a new edition is approaching.

With just a touch of study you need to find yourself saving a substantial amount on your university textbooks.

To sample a site showing both used and rental textbook prices go here.

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