College is not just about learning, knowledge and setting yourself up for the future. College is also about experience, about life, about moving on from adolescence to the precipice of adulthood. And adulthood is about responsibility. Doing what you have to, doing the hard thing, and surviving on your own without the emollient safety blanket of your parents. Because as a college student, you are a person with a meager budget and a high tuition, and to help ameliorate your situation, you will need to be frugal. Pinch pennies. Check the couch cushions, shake homeless men for loose change. This is what the college experience is all about. It is learning not just the didactic instruction of your professors, but learning to subsist on your own. To help in this cause, it is always important to adapt. You get creative, find seven different ways to cook the same package of instant ramen. You put in the effort to find the best deal, whether it be the cheap taco joint a few blocks off campus, the discount clothing store that has passably stylish fits, or the neighborhood run bookstore where you can snag used college textbooks at a fraction of the price. You work smarter, harder, and cheaper, because you’re a college student.
These days, however, you do not have to scrounge through darkened alleys for that mom and pop bookstore. You do not have to contact some shady stranger on a for sale ad, visit his suspicious tenement for that Psychology 101 book that might be three editions too old. You do not have to comb through garage sales, used book fairs, the musty, diseased strip bars hoping to find strippers working on their graduate degrees, or local Luddite and Salem inspired book burning ceremonies to find the cheap, used textbooks you so desperately require. No, fearless college student, all you need is a working computer, a reliable internet browser, and your university internet connection. For the internet is a place to save money, even more money than you believed theoretically possible. On the glorious, tubular series that is the internet, there are not only electronic books for sale, audiobooks, books purchase on tape, vinyl, and eight track, there are books that can be bought from all around the world. Get a copy of a syllabus from an Eskimo in the arctic, get a copy of the professor’s own philosophical memoirs, the one he is making you purchase to fill his own coffers, from a backpacking Swedish man turned ascetic who lives in the Alps. Or to save even more money, find a plethora of used textbooks and used college textbooks available for rental, for rock bottom, or if hyperbole be damned, mythically bottomless prices.
If you have a electronic reader, even better. Rent used college textbooks with the push of a button. Be the envy of all your classmates with your automated and technological and futurist style. Even if you arrive at a classroom and don’t have the book on hand, with the magic of a quick download you can buy or rent an electronic used textbooks like you were some sort of alchemist or wizard. Then, when you are finished with your used college textbooks, you do not have to let them sit in your dusty attic, or become cumbersome loads of dust magnetism, gaining weight to incredible heights of geometry and corpulence as you move on to bigger and better things. No, you simply sell the used textbooks back to the site, although the money is now a pittance to your burgeoning post graduate salary. And if you were savvy enough simply to rent, then the problem has already disappeared.
The selection online is infinite, for the internet itself is a galaxy all its own. It is a a catalog that continues to grow by the day, from the public domain classics to the contemporary literature to the journals and hardcore data you need to study in order to pass your class. Find new editions, first editions, stuff no longer in print. Find used books ranging all subjects and affectations, in the particular language you desire. For a student of French does not wish to have a bastardized English translation of the works of his favorite absurdists, nor does a fastidious student of German wish to read the philosophy of Nietzsche in anything other than its original penmanship. The online rental world is not limited to the size of a bookstore, a bookshelf, and the owner’s ability to alphabetize. An online bookstore with used textbooks is practically limitless, and the cost of maintaining this infinite galaxy is so infinitesimal that the savings are passed to your wallet, and by the transitive property, your stomach. Throw out the tacos and ramen and feast on steaks. You can buy an overpriced drink at the club, soup up your car with unnecessary body kits, and wear an overpriced piece of jewelry on your knuckles, because you had the foresight to purchase all your gear online and save an entire vault worth of hard earned cash, even if that was earned and provided by parents. It is money in your pocket now.
You saved money, you learned things, you gained valuable experience in life. You have passed the test. You have matriculated and graduated, and you did it through wisdom and moderation. You achieved this feat through online rentals of used college textbooks.
Sarah O’Sullivan is a representative of CollegeBookRenter.com where our goal is to make your textbook rental experience as easy as possible! Why rent college books from us? Not only is our rental system faster and easier but with CollegeBookRenter.com, renting your textbooks can save you up to 85% on your textbook costs! Want to know how to rent textbooks? Check us out on Youtube!
