Textbook Rental: Save Your Students Money

We all have a role in lowering the cost of higher education, and as a faculty member you have the power to select course materials and provide a major cost savings opportunity for your students.

Rent-A-Text takes aim at saving students money on their required and recommended course materials – without compromising your ability to choose the best possible materials for class use.

How the Program Works for Faculty

By clicking on the "Search the List" tab at the top of this page, you'll gain access to The List, our national database of rentable titles. We’ve applied our bibliographic expertise to the title assortment, taking into account textbook usage across the hundreds of bookstores we operate.

Follett will centrally research, identify, and maintain this national list of rental titles. This list is dynamic and new titles may be added or removed as new information is available.  Any store offering the rental program and carrying these titles will provide students the option to rent.  Titles will also be available through efollett.com.

Please consider adopting titles from our national list so that you can help drive down the cost for your class materials.  With thousands of titles across a majority of disciplines, The List will be your chance to help lower student education costs.

This national list is the product of faculty embracing cost-savings nationwide through multiple term adoption commitments.  Your commitment to multiple term title usage is a necessary component to sustaining this program and, ultimately, driving student savings.

Titles available for rent will be selected based on a number of criteria, including:

• Breadth of institutions using the title
• Type of book
• Expected life span

Please keep in mind that not all course materials will be available for rent.  Some of the reasons a text might not be available to rent include:

• Consumable or single use materials (for example, pass codes to on-line products, workbooks, working papers, etc.)
• Bundles and packages that contain consumable materials that are not available separately
• Loose-leaf and other unbound materials
• Materials not durable enough for multiple use
• Editions at the end of their life

There is another tremendous advantage to Rent-A-Text!  Not only does it provide a cost-saving rental program directly on your campus, but it is flexible for YOU.  Rent-A-Text doesn’t limit your cost-saving efforts to adoptions just from a national rental list.  Our program was built with faculty freedom in mind - allowing you to request any title to be added to Rent-A-Text at your specific campus with a simple multiple-term commitment.  Of course, the title must also meet the criteria to support multiple usages.  More information on the process of making your title rentable on your campus will be coming soon, so be sure to sign up for email updates!

What Other Faculty Are Saying About Rent-A-Text:

“The textbook rental program fits into the objective of decreasing costs for students. Very simple. Students can rent textbooks at fifty percent of the new cost. That saves them a lot of money. I think it’s a wonderful program. Here at the community college many of our students are on financial aid. This will be a tremendous boost to them if they can save money on textbooks. I think that’s great. I think it’s a tremendous program.”

       Monte Finkelstein Dean of History and Social Sciences
       Tallahassee Community College