CREDIT: WOODSWORTHFROSH.COM
Textbooks can cost a pretty penny, but a new rental service on campus could help you save big.

You're back in school and have already spent money on your laptop, rent and, of course, tuition. You seem to have everything you need for your first day of classes... or wait, do you? Oh that's right, you can't forget about your textbooks!

Instead of spending more money on books and getting deeper in debt, textbookrental.ca wants to help you save some money.

Textbookrental.ca is Canada's largest independent textbook website. The company started three years ago and its main focus is to rent textbooks to university and college students in Canada.

The Fanshawe Bookstore has recently signed a partnership with textbookrental.ca to offer a rental program to students that can help reduce the cost of textbooks.

When CEO Brandon Luft joined the company, he said they “started looking at working directly with bookstores and offering a textbook rental program through their website and their store.”

“We thought it would be a better way to kind of directly provide the service to students and something that the bookstores would want as an alternative source of getting textbooks to students,” he said.

David Smith, senior manager of retail services at Fanshawe, is happy with the partnership because it gives students the option to rent books and reduce the cost if they don't want to buy the book outright. “It gives the student another option for getting course material,” he said.

“They're not burdened with having to try to sell that book online or through the buy it back (at the bookstore) ... It's an alternative where they can reduce their educational costs,” said Smith.

To rent a book, go to fanshawe.textbookrental.ca and search for books by title, author or ISBN. Once you've chosen your books, they will be shipped to you. When the semester is finished, return the books back to the rental company using the prepaid mailing slip that comes with the textbooks. They can be dropped off at any Canada Post mailbox or office.

There is another way to rent books. “If students go on the Fanshawe bookstore website and they search for textbooks like they normally would, they'll see how much the bookstore is selling the book for, but they'll also see our rental price at the same time. So they'll be able to compare the two prices and decide whether or not they want to rent the book or buy it directly from the bookstore,” said Luft.

Smith said that the bookstore hopes to implement another way of renting books in the future. “There's another process that we're looking at, ‘in-store' rentals, where students could pick up any book off a shelf and then the textbook rental company would buy that book and it immediately becomes a rental. But that's a process we might be looking at down the road.”

For now, the only options available are buying books or renting them online.

Luft added that students can save between 30 and 75 per cent of the original cost of the book if they choose to rent. “On average it's usually around 50 per cent.”

However, this service won't be available for every course at Fanshawe. “We're at the mercy of what this company has in their inventory. They continually buy used books from other colleges and build up their inventory. So as we get into it and they buy back our books, they'll have a larger supply of books to rent to students,” said Smith.

Luft said that the bigger, more popular courses tend to have more rental options than the smaller niche classes.

To see which books are available to rent, go to fanshawe.bookware3000. ca or textbookrental.ca.