Textbook Rental Gaining Attention

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.

A recent article in the New York Times (registration) profiles one of the most successful of these companies, Chegg.com, which gravitated to book rental after starting up with a different intention. Here's the Times piece (registration). Apparently the company has found a way around legal concerns involving copyrights and intellectual property. 

It so happens that Chegg.com recently was chosen the 2009 "Northern California Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year" award for the Consumer Services category, as reported in Forbes.com.

The business model is similar to that of Netflix, which rents movies through the mail.

Here's a key passage from the Times piece:

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.

Comments

[John Soares]

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.