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Online textbook rental company Chegg wants college students to visit its website all year round, not just in the hectic first few days of every semester.
Chegg.com announced Aug. 18 a major expansion of its website that will not only add more eTextbooks, but also integrate other digital content such as homework help, professor ratings, and a study guide marketplace.
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Students’ hours-long web searches for cheap textbooks might be over.
SwoopThat.com, a site launched this spring, lets college students search many of the most popular websites – including Chegg.com, BookRenter.com and Amazon — for low-cost textbooks in one easy step: Plugging in a class schedule.
Once the student enters his or her courses for the coming semester, SwoopThat generates a list of every book needed for each class, along with every online textbook service that offers those textbooks at a discount. SwoopThat, which searches more than 15 million textbooks, has matched books to courses at 380 colleges, universities, and private schools.…Read More
After a bachelor’s degree, a law degree, and a business degree, Derek Haake estimates his total textbook costs at around $20,000 — and now he’s hitting back at the publishing industry with a website that could slash college students’ book costs.
Haake, of Akron, Ohio, launched the site BookDefy.com in April, creating a forum for students hoping to sell their textbooks for more than a few bucks to peers looking to save cash on used books.
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Buying pricey textbooks has never been a back-to-school highlight for college students, but according to a survey released Aug. 12, students rank textbooks among their leading wastes of money and the “biggest scam” in higher education.
Disdain for the costliness of textbooks was just one of the many financial worries revealed in a survey of college students conducted by online textbook rental company BookRenter, which launched in 2008 and serves about 5,000 college campuses with a library of 3 million textbooks.
The survey results echo a sentiment expressed by many student activists in recent years as textbook prices have soared and web-based book rental web sites have attracted millions of customers with texts often marked down by more than half the retail cost.…Read More