“Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks. Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry’s bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs. With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they’re out of a library – only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time …” (more)
[Stephanie Lee, Inside Higher Ed, 31 July]