In honor of the upcoming 40th Earth Day on April 22, we are exploring the question of the whether renting books is earth friendly.
Here is some food for thought and we welcome your questions and comments:
1) Renting books has been happening for years in the form of buying textbooks from your local university bookstore and (hopefully) selling used textbooks after finals. However, the textbook shuffle by publishers producing new book editions stops this renting cycle.
2) Renting textbooks from an online company incurs additional shipping of the book to and from your location. The environmental impact is most severe when people wait to the last minute to order a book and have it shipped via air. One also needs to consider the additional shipping materials involved and the fact most people still do not recycle (granted many municipalities do not offer easy recycling)
3) Does your textbook rental company do anything to offset their environmental impact? Some book rental companies utilize carbon offsets, others plant trees, or support various philanthropic interests. Do you know what they do – do you care?
4) Are eTextbooks or eBooks a better option in general? Should there be some other form of electronic textbooks?
Please comment and pose questions – we will follow up in the coming days with more information.
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Happy Earth Day! Thanks for reaching out. Some thoughts on your Q's:
1) The Higher Education Opportunity Act no longer allows publishers to print new editions within two years, so books stay in circulation longer. Chegg has national reach so books can be used three or four times on various campuses at much lower prices than new or used books.
2) Chegg incents students to rent their books in advance with our semester guarantee which offers students lower prices on their books and ground shipping. We have also committed to using only recycled materials for our Chegg boxes.
3)Chegg has partnered with American Forest Global ReLeaf program to plant a tree every time a student rents from us. In three short years, we’ve planted nearly 3 million trees in Lake Tahoe, Cameroon, and Guatemala. We are proud to be American Forest’s largest tree planting partners.
4)Almost 80% of students are still using textbooks, so why not save a ton of money and plant a tree by using Chegg?!
Thanks for your response Tina – keep those trees growing.
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1. Yes, used textbooks are sold on Amazon and many other online bookselling venues. I suspect mostly first-semester freshmen buy their textbooks, new or used, in the physical campus store.
2. Many students sell their textbooks online at the end of each semester. The online venues make it easy for them.
3. Clegg buys a great many of the textbooks it rents out from online booksellers.
finally trying to sell those textbooks that I horded for 6 years through college…
All good choices. There are now a dozen major sites doing textbook rentals and over two dozen sites offering used textbooks. The key to finding the cheapest site is to use a price comparison site like RentScouter.com. The site does not sell textbooks, just points you to the cheapest used, lowest rental, ebook and international priced textbooks and also who has the highest buyback price.