You can rent textbooks?

Yes, it’s true! You can rent your expensive required GCSU textbooks for a fraction of the price of buying them. One easy, fast, and cheap way to do this is through Amazon.com. If you are an Amazon Prime member you may be able to get some of your books within two days. Renting textbooks can be very convenient for working students, online students, or even out of town students. If you are not an Amazon Prime member yet, a free 6-month membership is available to you as a student and then you only pay half the price the cost of membership as long as you are a student. To see a previous story on this on how to get your free 6-months of Amazon Prime, click here.

When searching for your textbook on Amazon.com simply enter the ISBN, the actual name of the book, or even the author. Most of the required GCSU textbooks should be available for rent. For example, let’s say you need the required textbook Essentials of Oceanography for OCE 1001. This book at the time of this writing only costs $20.53 to rent for the entire semester from Amazon while the GCSU Bookstore lists this book as $193.75 to buy new. That is a significant price difference.

See the screenshots from both Amazon.com and the GCSU bookstore:

You get to keep the rented textbook for the entire semester. At the end of the semester returning is easy as well. Simply print out the Amazon.com provided packing slip, put the book back in the original packing materials, tape it up and drop it off at a UPS store. Then that’s it, no postage or shipping costs.

The point of this story is not to take any business away from our local GCSU bookstore but to provide students with an alternative way to get their textbooks. How often do students even open up a textbook that is required for a class after that class is over? That is why renting makes so much sense. Renting is economical and ecofriendly as textbooks can be rented and reused by several students throughout a textbook’s lifespan.

So, if you are wanting to save some money, give renting your textbooks from Amazon.com a try!

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