Renting books online has been savings college students thousands of dollars each year, but can a new etextbook alternative, McGraw-Hill’s Create, begin to unseat an online textbook rental?
Over the last few years online textbook rental companies like Chegg, BookRenter, and CampusBook Rentals have been saving college goers lots of money, and the desire for electronic textbooks has not caught hold. Much of this reason is that etextbooks are not competitively priced, especially against used textbooks – and there is no way to transfer or sell back those electronic textbooks. However, today McGraw-Hill Higher Education is launching a new service, Create, that will allow college instructors around the world to quickly design custom etextbooks.
Create is an innovative platform that allows teachers to draw from over 50,000 sources and create custom ebooks, currently in English, Italian, Spanish with more languages to come in the future. Professors now have access to a vast library of resources to pull together custom content specifically tailored for their course or local region. While a textbook rental will save you money on attending college it doesn’t allow for content to be easily changed and updated like electronic textbooks. The current library for Create includes over 25,000 case studies from Harvard Business School, 11,000 humanities and philosophy readings, 5,500 various articles, and over 4000 textbooks published by McGraw-Hill.
Generally within an hour of creating their custom school book content a professor is emailed an electronic copy of their textbook, or a printed copy in less than five days. Through a partnership with Blackboard, Inc. professors can upload the custom content for college attendees to review or purchase online. Because the newly created school book is in electronic format information can easily be added or modified instead of forcing a new edition to be created as would be the case with a printed textbook rental. Custom publishing is one of the fastest growing segments of the education market, growing at a rate of 25% annually and tools like Create will only help it gain in popularity.
Textbook rentals save you money. Rent textbooks from our selection of new and used textbooks. Prefer to buy used textbooks – we have an extensive inventory of cheap used textbooks. Whether you Rent or Get Used, your textbook rental or purchase will be delivered fast, right to your door.
Textbook Rentals are great – but what if you need or want a new textbook. TextbookStop.com lets you decide between a new or used textbook rental. Regardless of how you chose, when you rent textbooks at TextbookStop.com, your books will be delivered fast, right to your door.
Great insight! Textbook Rental prices continue to rise, but there are numerous ways to cut costs by shopping online.
Chegg is a great site and a valuable resource for cash-strapped college students. With their Chegg Champions program, which I am a part of, they have leveraged non-traditional marketing and social media to create brand awareness on campuses across the country. They recognized the need to use “peer marketing” rather than a more traditional media strategy to reach a college student audience. I am curious to see how they develop this program and market their site going forward as the textbook rental segment expands and new competition arises.
Chegg, the largest online textbook rental company, is unveiling two new services today to help expand its reach into the university student market. Describing it as an effort to personalize its offerings, Chegg will now offer homework help as well as course scheduling information to its customers. These new features aren’t a surprise. They follow Chegg’s acquisitions last year of CourseRank and Cramster. The former offers course scheduling and review information, and the latter offers homework help. The services these companies offered have now been integrated into Chegg so that its textbook rental customers can easily take advantage of them. Sponsor Using the course scheduling tool, students at 600 participating universities will be able to pick their classes armed with a lot more data: not just the class schedule (the key, of course, is to always avoid classes on Fridays), but the average grade for the class (so students can access its level of difficulty) as well as students’…
You can rent books for free at a place called a library. Is that how you spell it?