Amazon: Rent Textbooks and Save as Much as 90%
Calling all college students! Did you know that you can rent textbooks directly from Amazon.com and save as much as 90%? To get started, just head here, enter the title, author or ISBN and then look for applicable books with a Rent option. All Textbook rentals are eligible for Prime FREE Two-Day Shipping or FREE Shipping on orders over $35, all books rent for the semester, and all books offer FREE return shipping at the end of the semester.
And Amazon’s standard 30 day return policy applies to textbooks as well! If you return the textbook within the first 30 days of your rental period in the same condition as when you received it, you will receive a full refund of the rental fee.
Instead of renting a physical textbook, how about renting an eTextbook? You can choose a rental length between 30 and 360 days and you’ll pay only for the exact time you need a book. Plus once you rent the eTextbook, you can read it on your Kindle Fire or the Kindle app for iPad, Android tablets, PC, or Mac. Head over here to get a FREE 7-Day Trial for Kindle eTextbooks.
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Do you own textbooks that you no longer use/need? Just head here, search for books that you own and view the Trade In value, ship your books for free and then get paid with an Amazon Gift Card.[/h2s_box]
I started rented from them last semester and I’ve had a positive experience.
Renting*
You can always check if your text books on Amazon. A classmate of mine paid under $4 for the same book I paid over $80! Ouch!
Thanks, Kimka for your feedback! My son & I were up at 0530 this morning signing him up for his first semester of college & the next place I went to after 0602 this morning was Amazon! I don’t even know what textbooks he needs yet- but this is BY FAR our 1st choice. Collin & Company- your timing is dumbfounding 😉
Even before the government required it, I always shared the ISBN with my students so they could look for the book on Amazon or another bookseller/bookrenter. College bookstores charge way too much. You can always check with the instructor if an international edition or an older edition is acceptable; great saving can be had by going these routes, too.
How nice of u. My college professor literally wrote the book we used in his class and required us to buy the current edition NEW. It was an English Lit class so there was obviously no new info in the new edition, he just wanted to mk money off his students!!
That stinks! One of my professors wrote the book for our class too, but he made it into an ebook and listed it as free on amazon.
I had this happen too. $150 for the book HE wrote! I felt so scammed.
I had to buy a TON of books for nursing school. The school’s bookstore prices would have cost me $1900. I got the exact same books from amazon (many of them rented) for $900. That’s a huge savings. And shipping them back is free. I definitely recommend getting books from Amazon over any where else.
International editions are straight up fraudulent. They go around copyright laws and produce books they do not have permission to copy.
Sorry, but that is not true. The international edition of the book I use is from the same publisher’s UK offices.
& for those of you who buy books amazon does have a nice buy back program… You can sell them a text book you didn’t even buy from them… We normally do price comparisons & 80% of the time amazon is the cheapest. Another thought… Ebook version! Simply download it, one draw back is you can’t search (control f) it.., but you can’t do that with a regular book either. My husband downloaded a few ebooks & while didn’t care for it, he appreciated not lugging around the books… Just make sure your kindle or whatever you are reading it on is fully charged before class!!! Sucks having your kindle die when you need it during class.
Please mark on your calendar when you are to return any book you rent. My daughter did not see the email they sent her because it was sent to an old email. Well they took $200.00 out of her account. When she called to say she still has the book and will return it immediately they basically said too bad too late. Luckily she had $3.00 left in her account. UGHHHHH!!! It’s hard to keep track if you have several books purchased or rented. Especially if some are through Amazon and some are through the College. Just want to make sure this doesn’t happen to others. We were trying for a reduced cost and it ended up costing several times to much. 🙁
If I remember correctly there’s also an option to receive a text message as a reminder to return your books.
I bought a few from Amazon, but also used Bookbyte and Abebooks websites. Great prices and you can also sell your books back to them for much more than the campus bookstores will give you. Plus, they pay for shipping and it’s super easy.
I actually managed to break even or even make money some semesters on my text books by buying them used from Amazon sellers, and then reselling them myself on Amazon 2-3 weeks before the next semester started (that is peak time for buying textbooks and will likely get you the highest selling price). It’s super easy to do and only costs a couple bucks to ship via USPS media mail and you’ll get MUCH more money doing it that way than selling them directly back to Amazon via their textbook buy back program. Buy your books early and used and sell them back yourself and you have a great chance of making most your money back!
What a good idea. Thanks Megan!
I do this as well and usually get back 75% of what I paid, and sometimes more than I paid. 🙂
A good textbook price comparison site I like to use is bigwords.com, since sometimes amazon isn’t the cheapest retailer.
I agree with you about using a comparison site.
Be careful about “buying a book and planning on selling it back.” If a book is coming out with a new edition, you may not be able to sell it back to Amazon or a college bookstore and may have to sell it as an independent seller on Amazon, Ebay, or Craigslist. Half-Price Books will buy older editions, but you won’t get a full amount for them, of course.
Another place to check for rental books is Chegg. My children have all had positive experiences renting books.
Don’t forget to Google “coupon codes” for Chegg—-they always have them and you can save a lot!
If it is not a math or science course, you can definitely get by with a previous edition. There is a new edition about every two years. Not that much changes, maybe the excerpt about the author. You can always ask the professor. Make a friend and ask to copy the pages that have changed. It is hundreds of dollars cheaper in some cases. Has anyone had textbooks that were “custom” to their college? Those are just ridiculous.
I so agree with you. “Custom” books are a scam, IMHO. It makes it so students can’t sell them back as easily.
Chegg has always come out cheaper than amazon for me. Especially since they usually have a coupon code. May just be my books though but definitely shop around!
textbookrentals.com will do an internet price comparison for you. They even show the cost to buy books and also a sell-back price. I found buying a couple of books for my son’s college classes this semester actually cheaper than renting them.
This is the same price Amazon is ALL the time.