Students are learning quickly that you don't have to purchase textbooks, but can rent them instead. As reported here earlier, a number of companies have started to specialize in rentals, with students ordering books online to be distributed through the mail, for a full term, at a fraction of the cost of purchasing texts. The new approach is not suited for everyone, and the savings depends upon the availability and the original cost of each book. Not surprisingly, there are restrictions on marking up the texts.
E-commerce was all the rage with investors during the Internet boom of the late 1990s. Of course, many start-ups failed. In recent years, most of the successful ideas in e-commerce have been refinements or variations of models that had been tried before.
In the case of Chegg and some budding competitors, the inspiration was Netflix.
“We benefit from the comfort zone that people have with renting things online from Netflix,” said Colin Barceloux, the co-founder of BookRenter.com, a Chegg rival that is also based in Silicon Valley.
What disturbs me about this is that students are not keeping their textbooks for future reference. When I was in college I kept nearly every one of my books.
Posted by: John Soares | July 09, 2009 at 10:58 AM