With the school year fast approaching, there is a new business model that is rapidly gaining popularity within the textbook industry: textbook rentals. Popularized by companies like Chegg.com and Bookrenter.com, the nation’s largest college bookstore operator, Barnes & Noble, recently announced plans to expand its rental service to hundreds of more campuses across the nation. While the textbook renting model does solve a current problem that students have struggled with for years (exorbitant textbook prices), it does not create a business model that benefits the students for the long-term for a variety of reasons.

Move to Digital

As the world rapidly becomes more and more digital in every aspect of life, it is only a matter of time before most textbooks move into a digital format. The publishers have been offering digital textbooks (or supplements) for years, but with the recent explosion of the tablet/eReader, this trend towards digital textbooks is only accelerating.  In fact, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association, recently claimed that in the next five years the digital book will replace the printed book as the more dominant format in the publishing industry. While I do not necessarily agree with this timeline, I do believe that this movement will occur sometime within the next decade.

The issue this raises is that as textbooks do become more digital, the price of printed textbooks will only rise in coordination with the increased adoption of digital textbooks (supply and demand). Consequently, services like Chegg.com and BookRenter.com will have to raise their prices accordingly, and even if one decides to purchase a digital textbook, the price of that digital textbook will still be exorbitantly high because the publishers will want to maintain their margins. Therefore, while textbook renting might be a cost-saver at the moment, it does not create a sustainable model that will reduce costs for students in the long term.

More Effective Educational Tools

From an educational standpoint, textbook renting also does not encourage the evolution of the textbook into a more effective educational tool. It is a common complaint among high school and college staff that very few students read their textbooks any more, and the question is why? Perhaps it is because students are evolving and do not learn in the same way that their parents or grandparents learned. It should be the responsibility of the publishers to recognize this and realize there is a huge market opportunity if they were to develop affordable, multimedia, digital textbooks for students that allow them to choose whichever method best suits their learning style (video, reading, interactive, etc.). Instead of developing new textbooks in coordination with new business models that would truly help their customers learn more effectively and affordably, the publishers are trying to devise ways to combat services like textbook renting and other money-saving opportunities for students to protect their bottom line.

Where Does the Industry Go from Here?

Within the next ten years, the education industry will undergo a transformation that will fundamentally change the way it currently operates; consequently, industries that serve the education market, like textbook publishing, will need to undergo a transformation as well. While currently textbook renting is a great option for students to save money, it will not be a long term solution to making textbooks more affordable and effective for students. Startup publishers like the Worldwide Center of Mathematics and Flat World Knowledge are just the beginning of what will surely be a very competitive market to help bring down the cost of textbooks and ultimately make education more affordable for students.