Post date: May 27, 2014 8:39:29 PM

Books are a critical cost of going to college. Any financial aid you receive takes this into account. But students can and should seek other options when available. And don’t forget about the library, says a recent New York Times article on the topic.

Sites such as Chegg.com, Campusbooks.com and Packback offer price-comparison tools for finding better deals on specific textbooks. And there’s the option to rent textbooks instead of buying them.

Chegg rents textbooks to students, as do sites like Campus Book Rentals and BookRenter. Amazon offers some textbook rentals, although there are restrictions on what states books can be shipped to. Packback is trying to improve on the textbook rental idea by offering on-demand digital book rentals for between $3 and $5 day. The assumption is that students don’t always need a textbook for an entire semester — they may need it only a few times a year.

For more details or ideas, see The New York Times piece "Bringing Tech Culture to the Staid College Quad."