Using a service such as Chegg.com, students can save on average more than $600 a year when they rent textbooks over purchasing them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Textbooks are going to remain a key part of learning. They just need to go digital, become more interactive and they need more analytics.
Parents are telling other parents that you can save a lot of money renting. Forever they've been looking for a solution to higher textbook prices.
My first Kickstarter project created a book called 'Clear and Present Thinking', a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students.
Textbook rental is a great concept. It is just a great business model.
The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.
The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.
I buy thousands of books a year.
Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.
For the price of a couple of Happy Meals, you can buy a digital textbook and stop your child from having to carry around a six-pound book.
Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.