Lighten up (and Spend Less): Where to Stock up on Digital Textbooks
Have you ever picked up a student’s book bag? That thing is crazy heavy. Put a couple of textbooks, a laptop, a bottle of water, a binder, and a lunch in there, and the pounds really add up.
The dollars add up, too. College textbooks can cost hundreds of dollars these days. (Which makes the old strategy of buying two copies — one for home, one for school, to give you less to lug around — less affordable than ever.)
But there is a solution to the textbook problem: If you trade paper and ink for pixels on a screen, the texts for an entire semester will fit on a device that weighs less than a pound. Pixels are cheaper too, with electronic textbooks costing a fraction of their printing-press counterparts. And that leaves plenty of backpack space for old baloney sandwiches and last week’s gym shorts.
You have lots of options when it comes to buying or renting textbooks, and you might have to shop around a bit to find every book you need. So we rounded up a virtual mall of new, used, and rental textbook stores to get you started.
Amazon
Amazon is the king of the digital book, with an entire division devoted to selling and renting textbooks. Here, the books are not just lighter and cheaper but better.
First of all, renting digital textbooks from Amazon is easy: Pay up, download, and the book expires from your library when your rental period is over. You can read your textbook on any device or on all the devices you own: phone or Kindle on the bus, big tablet or laptop at home. And Amazon provides a bunch of handy in-text tools to make studying easier: multi-colored highlighting, notes, flash cards, and Amazon’s slick X-Ray function (which finds definitions, themes, and relevant content from sources such as Wikipedia and YouTube).
Textbooks are generally for high school through college. But this can also be a great place to get digital versions of the classics younger kids have to read – and those are often free.
Google Play
The Google Play textbook store is well stocked. And, if you rent here, you’ll pay as much as 80 percent less than buying the printed text. You can rent (for six months) or buy right from the Google Play store and instantly read your books online or offline from whatever device you have: iPad, Android tablet or phone, or your computer using the Web app.
And, as with Amazon, these ebooks offer a few features the printed versions can’t: Highlight a block of text (in a variety of colors); get a definition of a selected word; copy selected text into a paper you’re writing or sync it to Google Docs; or translate it into your native tongue.
If you have an Android phone and an Android tablet, all you have to do is open your library on those devices, and the books you’ve bought or rented will be there. It’s so much easier than running to your locker for your book bag. As with Amazon, textbooks are mostly for high school and college but there is an entire library of instant books here.
Apple iBooks
There are lots of texts in Apple’s iBook Textbook store. And they are cheaper than the paper version, show up instantly in your library when you buy them, and allow note taking, highlighting, and other study aids.
Most notable here, though, are the texts that go beyond the printed versions to incorporate interactive media that illustrates the subject in ways the printed word can’t. Why just talk about the human heart or DNA string when you can (virtually) pick it up and turn it around? Why read words on a page when you can touch them to dig deeper for illustrations and explanations that pop up and take you into a topic? Why just link to a video online when you can embed it in the book? This is the Harry Potter future of texts and it’s worth a try.
There are texts for all grades here.
Chegg eTextbooks
Here you’ll find hundreds of thousands of textbooks for high school through college students that you can read on Chegg’s interactive site, which was designed precisely for the purpose. The service will work on any connected device and has lots of great study aids, from instant word definitions to highlighting to notes you can add to the text and review before the final exam.
Extra cool here, is the ability to ask questions of the Chegg’s Homework Help community right from the text – and get an answer. Chegg also sells paper texts and if you are buying one of those, will often let you read the digital copy – for free – while you wait for the book to be delivered. The texts also work with Chegg’s Study Service, which offers interactive study guides for 9,000 particularly difficult textbooks.
eCampus.com
eCampus.com is a big online textbook store, with over 4,000,000 new, used and electronic textbooks for sale or rent. (It’s also a good place to sell used texts.) The digital version of a given textbook here is often cheaper than a used print version. For example, Campbell Biology, an often-required biology text, is almost $70 cheaper than the used paper version. And you can save up to 90 percent of the publisher’s list price.
Nearly 100,000 of those titles are available as digital texts you can read online or off with the eCampus.com Reader. So, if you are having trouble finding a title elsewhere, check here. The reader works on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.
VitalSource
VitalSource’s digital textbook rental service (formerly known as CourseSmart) started out as a way for professors to easily and quickly evaluate textbooks to decide which ones to use in their classes. That went so well, that the company expanded the service to allow students to access those same texts the same easy, digital way.
So chances are that, if a text is required for a course, it’ll be available here. Read the books in the free mobile app online or off and when the course is over, the book is gone from your library. You can mark up texts, highlight, copy passages, print pages, and lots more from the app. And you’ll save 60 percent of the cost of buying the paper version.
