Students who are thinking of renting textbooks instead of buying them this upcoming semester may want to reconsider their options, according to a study by BIGWORDS.com. The study by the price comparison website showed that renting textbooks is not cheaper than buying and selling them back, despite the recent rental trend among bookselllers. Sales and rental data from January 2012 and buyback data from April to May 2012 were compared in the study. BIGWORDS.com researched 1,000 textbooks by search volume on its own website, and found that buying and selling textbooks instead of renting them saved an average of 95 percent, or $1,000 per school year for students. Jeff Sherwood, CEO of BIGWORDS.com, said he was surprised with the results of the study because renting a book looks like the cheapest option, but online retailers look at all prices instead of just one to determine the buying and selling rate. He said bookstores can’t offer the same prices online bookstores can. “We search the inventories of all online stores, so we’ll have a much larger inventory than the on-campus bookstores,” Sherwood said. Sherwood said the low percentage of money students get from selling back their books is a result of bookstores acting like a middleman; students sell books back to bookstores, which then sell them to the book distributor. He said the student gets the short end of the stick. Nick Richard, textbook manager of Chimes Textbook Exchange on West Chimes Street, disagreed, saying that from what he’s seen, renting is cheaper than buying and selling back textbooks. Richard said Chimes Textbook Exchange sells about 15,000 textbooks each year, and about 85 percent of those books are rented. He said the buyback rate was low for the Exchange in the 2011 to 2012 school year because of the rising rental rate. “Take the big freshmen-enrollment classes, like biology or psychology. The average cost of one of those books is $110; about 70 percent of the list price is what the rental price is.” As to online booksellers, Richard said, “There’s no one to talk to when there’s a problem with the book.” Richard also mentioned the access codes some books require for online schoolwork. “For a class like Biology 1001, where there is usually an access code, a national bookselling website wouldn’t have access to a specific code, like LSU’s.”
 
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