Now in its third semester, the Brown Bookstore's textbook rental program is an increasingly popular cost-saving tool among students. About 1,400 students used the program last semester, compared to roughly 300 students who used it in spring 2011, according to Mike McDade, the bookstore's textbook department manager. McDade predicted the program would be used by 2,500 to 3,000 students this semester.
The program also retains business for the bookstore, which has no plans to scale it back in coming years, said Steven Souza, the bookstore's director.
The bookstore took a hit with the growing accessibility of Amazon and other outside textbook options for students in recent years, but the rental program, implemented January 2011, has checked its decline, Souza said.
"Everywhere, textbook sales have been going down," Souza said. "The rental option has presented a change in the dynamic." He said bookstore traffic has stayed constant over the last year.
Through the program, the bookstore offers many textbooks at discounted prices and requires students to return the books at the end of the semester. Because the process lengthens the life of a textbook, the bookstore is able to cut costs significantly. The rental program especially mitigates the cost of frequent new editions, Souza said.
The bookstore employs two kinds of rental programs, McDade said. Major textbooks the bookstore owns and knows will be used every semester — like the one for ECON 0110: "Principles of Economics" — are kept in stock to rent out.
Most others are part of a "second-layer program," McDade said, which is backed up by a third-party provider. Each semester, the bookstore produces a list of books it needs, and the provider tells the bookstore how much it will pay for the return of each book. The bookstore then sets a discounted rental price for students, and it is able to make a small profit when it sells the book back to the provider.
The program is especially popular for large, expensive textbooks ubiquitous to science and social science courses.
The University is not alone in its provision of a rental program, joining 2,560 college stores that offered such a program last semester. Two years earlier, that number was 300, according to a Jan. 31 press release from the National Association of College Stores. The release estimated national student savings from the programs totaled roughly $200 million last semester.
Charles Schmidt, director of public relations for the association, said he expected rental programs to stay strong for a while. "Because the college stores are dedicated to saving students money on their course materials, and because this seems to have shown success, there's no reason to change," he said. Nonetheless, he pointed to "custom course savings," in which stores would offer only the sections of textbooks that professors wanted, as another upcoming bookstore offering.
At the Brown Bookstore, expansion is on the horizon. "We would like to ramp it up," McDade said. "Right now we're sort of held in check by this process called serialization," or cataloguing and creating a database of all the books' serial numbers. He said the bookstore would ideally get a significant software upgrade to boost that process. Though it has yet to decide whether there are sufficient funds, the upgrade would be in July's budget and likely implemented by next January. If it materialized, the bookstore could eventually offer students the choice of new, used or rental at the check-out cash register.
Very few students fail to return textbooks at the end of the semester — McDade said the bookstore had to "chase down about 30 students" last semester, but most had simply forgotten and paid a late fee.
Many students spoke positively about the rental program. Dan Chinh Nguyen '14 said she used it this semester because the option made financial and practical sense. "The textbook was $250, and renting it was $95," she said, also citing "the fact that you don't really need the textbook after you take the class." Though she has sold books back to the bookstore in the past, renting is much cheaper, she said.
But the numbers did not add up for Nikita Uberoi '15, who said she can sell textbooks elsewhere and sometimes prefers to keep books.
"I feel like renting it isn't worth it because you still pay a lot of money," she said.
