It’s been a long time since I was in college. No comments from the peanut gallery, thanks. But I do remember how expensive textbooks were then, and they still are now. Back then (and now I’m leaning on my cane and wagging my finger) we didn’t have computers or the internet, so your only method of getting any money back was to have the campus bookstore buy them back, or you did a handwritten sign and posted it all over campus. Seems laughable now, huh? And you know that one commercial where the guys buy a video game, then they take it back to the store to have it purchased back, and the guy offers them about 10% of the original cost–that’s what selling textbooks used to be like. The campus bookstore, on a good day, would give you 10-20% of what you paid for it. But it was always at the end of the semester, and we were all broke, so we took it.

Thankfully technology and the internet has made some of this better for today’s students. First, there is CampusBookRentals, where you can lease/loan your textbooks rather than purchasing them. “Oh, but then I can’t highlight in them……” You can! Here are just some of the program options:

-save 40-90% off of bookstore prices
-free shipping both ways
-can highlight in the textbooks
-flexible renting periods
-we donate to Operation Smile with each textbook rented

There also is an option called RentBack, where you actually rent out the text books you own. Depending on what you paid for the books, you could actually make more money than what you paid for it! And at the end of it all, you still have the text for your resource library if you want.
You can watch this to learn more about what they do.

And, after all that, the folks at CampusBookRental take the time to help out at Operation Smile! How cool is that? You save money, they help a great cause, sounds win-win to me!