Academic Rent-a-Book

In the rapidly evolving college textbook market, one of the nation’s largest textbook publishers, Cengage Learning – one of the largest textbook publishers in the nation – has announced they will start renting textbooks at 40 to 70 percent of the sale price. Students can get the first chapter as a download while they wait for the book to arrive, then rent it for 60, 90, or 130 days, after which they can return the book or opt to buy it. One of the benefits of this process, aside from saving students money, is that the authors of the books receive royalties on each rental, just as they do on first-sale – something they did not receive in traditional buy back and resale.

No word on how much highlighting and notes in the margins they’ll accept – ?