Buying vs. Renting & Where To Rent! Professors will have required texts for classes, whether they be full textbooks, course packs, or novels. If you'd like to buy a textbook, please look for a used version first on Amazon before buying it new from the bookstore. New textbooks are often hundreds of dollars.
The best route to go is to rent a textbook. When you rent a textbook, it's often much cheaper, and you don't need to worry about getting rid of it at the end of the semester.
A great site to use is bigwords.com to compare textbook purchase/rental prices. Type in the ISBN number or the title/authors and find the book you need. Select it and see what is cheapest. The company you choose (for example, Barnes & Noble or TextbookRush, etc) will ship it to you. If you rent, they then email you a return postage sheet a few weeks before the book is due to be returned, you print it out, then tape it on a padded envelope and send it back after the number of weeks you’ve chosen (usually 16 is the length of a semester). Just drop it in the mailbox and you're done!