College students fed up with spending hundreds of dollars to buy textbooks they use only once are getting some new rental options.
And textbook publishers, undercut by sales and rentals of used versions that push them to the sidelines, are hoping they have figured out some new strategies to make money.
Stamford, Conn.-based Cengage Learning on Thursday announced plans to rent titles directly to students for 40 percent to 70 percent off the suggested retail price.
Also Thursday, McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced a partnership with website — one of numerous websites that have popped up selling and renting secondhand books. Under the arrangement, McGraw-Hill will provide new textbooks to Chegg, offering the company a bigger inventory of books to lend out, and McGraw-Hill will get a share of the rental revenue.
Textbook costs can add several hundred dollars per year to college costs for students and raise howls of protest at the start of each semester. But publishers maintain textbooks are expensive to produce, and the only chance they have to recoup their investment is revenue from the initial sale.
Cengage called its announcement the first example of a higher education publisher renting titles directly to students.
McGraw-Hill billed its partnership as the first of its kind with a textbook rental company.
Both arrangements offer the major publishers something novel: the potential to collect money on each printed copy over multiple years.
Cengage said several hundred titles will be available starting in December, with more to follow next July. McGraw-Hill said the pilot program with Chegg would cover 25 titles.
Meanwhile, Inc. is aiming the new, bigger version of its Kindle electronic reading device at the college market, with six universities running Kindle pilots this fall.
