re: 50-plus vetted resources and tips for college students

Sean Young — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:05:31 GMT

I am a huge proponent of textbook rentals for students. There are 3 reasons:

1/ The money. Sites like Chegg.com have already saved students over $44 million in reduced textbook costs through renting. Textbook buyback programs pay 10-15%of the original purchase price, and are immediately resold at 60-75% of retail. That represents an abusive practice in our books.

2/ Impact on people and planet. 20 textbooks is about 1 tree. (http://www.conservatree.org) x the 18 million students enrolled in universities and colleges in the US alone every year. As a comparison - it takes about 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in American mailboxes each year.

3/ Private ownership is not the only way. Despite what we have been taught about the high achievement of private ownership – temporary use items should move from person to person (the inspiration behind the creation of borrowme). Some items are not shareable – but textbooks are a prime candidate.

A second option that has been the subject of discussion recently on various money saver blogs for students is the creation of local ‘Textbook Sharing’ clubs on campus. You could use a site like Meetup.com, or likely a better solution is BorrowMe.com - that is setup for exactly that.

Anyone can find or start a local textbook sharing group on BorrowMe at www.borrowme.com/students. If you’d like to discuss the idea with me personally for your campus community, I’d love to hear from you.

– Sean

http://www.borrowme.com/sean

borrowme.com/.../contactus.php

re: 50-plus vetted resources and tips for college students

Ryan — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:34:33 GMT

Great resources in this summary, I particularly enjoy Broke Grad's and Ramit's Blogs.

We recently developed a post on how to save a bunch of money buying textbooks. spillingbuckets.blogspot.com/.../how-to-save-bunch-of-money-buying.html During my research into why textbook prices are so high I thought the first thing I would be talking about would be the greedy book publishers and their scummy price gouging. I found out that this might not be the case. It's kind of an interesting catch 22. Frugal students trying to save money by purchasing used books (and organizing the used book marketplace) have caused book publishers to raise prices and release new (but usually unchanged) editions to keep students buying. Where will it end?