“One of the biggest, yet least-known bargains in higher education is housed in 7,500 square feet on the edge of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville campus. Stacked in rows of bookshelves are tens of thousands of textbooks there for the renting, saving students from spending many hundreds of dollars to buy them.
In the last year or so, SIUE, Southeast Missouri State University and a couple dozen other schools that have run textbook rental programs for decades have been fielding calls from around the country about how they work.
‘The last few months, it seems like we’ve been besieged,’ said King Lambird, assistant director of SIUE’s Textbook Service…. Legislators in California considered rental programs last year, and cash-strapped students at various campuses have taken an interest in the programs as well….
At Southeast Missouri State, in Cape Girardeau, students pay $83.75 a semester to rent textbooks for five courses. Compare that to the nearly $900 a year the average student will spend on textbooks, according to a survey released last month by the state Public Interest Research Groups. Other groups have put the cost at $600 to $1,000, depending on the classes a student takes and the textbooks a professor chooses. The situation is likely to get worse. The producer price index of college textbooks — the price at which publishers sell the books — has gone up 41.8 percent since 1998, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In that same time, the index for finished goods has gone up just 12.3 percent. Publishers blame the increases on more sophisticated textbooks and practices such as bundling, where textbooks come shrink-wrapped with CD-ROMs, workbooks and other study guides.”
More at http://www.kaleo.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/02/11/420c6cac5c6a7