Last fall the bookstore began offering students the chance to rent their textbooks, as opposed to buying them—with the option of selling them back to the bookstore at a reduced price at the end of the semester. The rental price results in a 50-percent or higher initial savings, which is quite attractive to cash-strapped students who can spend several hundred dollars on books each semester. Attractive enough, in fact, that textbook rentals increased by 116 percent during the spring semester, with nearly a third of all books now available to rent.
