The first week of college is filled with a bunch of crazy new things you have to adapt to if you want to make it out alive. Co-ed dorms. People with bad facial hair. Faux-Intellectuals. Scantly clad women. Demented professors. Weird cultish groups called fraternities. The absence of personal hygiene. And most importantly, the astronomical prices of textbooks.
Why have we had a congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball, but not a peep about college textbook prices? We thought that the iPad and eBooks were supposed to make education a whole lot cheaper, but most college students still buy physical textbooks. Here at Cult of Mac, for back to school season, we wanted to find out what’s cheaper: buying an iPad and only buying eTextbooks or going the traditional route and buying forty or fifty pounds worth of dead paper every semester.
Which is better for the penny-pinching student? The results are pretty surprising.
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It’s Possible To Recoup The Cost Of A New iPad By Buying eTextbooks
The cheapest model of the new iPad costs $499 plus tax. In order for it to be worth that investment – in terms of saving you money on textbook prices – you’ll need to be able to save $62.37 per semester by purchasing eTextbooks instead of the regular paper kind. If you’re able to purchase most of your books as eTextbooks, then it’s pretty likely that you’ll save more than enough over four years to cover the cost of the new iPad.
Everyone’s course load and reading list at school is different, but here’s a breakdown of the book costs this semester for our friend Jessica, who is about to enter her junior year at Arizona State University. All of her textbooks are available as new, used, rental, eTextbook, and eTextbook Rental.
| New Textbook | Used Textbook | Rental | eBook | eBook Rental | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life: The Science of Biology | $196.25 | $147.25 | $78.50 | $94.99 | $75.99 | |
| Practical Research: Planning and Design | $84.85 | $63.50 | $42.21 | $33.99 | $33.99 | |
| Visual Environmental Science | $116.50 | $87.50 | $81.55 | $65.50 | $54.50 | |
| Voyages in World History | $87.75 | $66.00 | $43.83 | $46.49 | $46.49 | |
| Elementary Differential Equations | $224.25 | $168.25 | $168.25 | $113.50 | $39.49 | |
| Total Cost | $709.60 | $532.50 | $414.34 | $354.47 | $250.46 |
Jessica could rent all of her textbooks from the bookstore for just $414.34, but she’d save $163.88 for the semester if she rents them as eBooks instead. Also, If she wanted to buy all of her textbooks new and keep them , then she’d save $355.13 if she just buys them as eBooks.
Even if this is an odd semester with higher book prices for Jessica, she’ll still probably save more in the long term by getting an iPad and eTextbooks instead of traditional textbooks.
Sample iPad savings per semester: $163.88 for renting, $355.13 for buying
Renting An eTextbook Will Always Save You The Most Money
| Physical Rental | eTextbook | eTextbook Rental | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Cost of 20 Different Textbooks | $1451.53 | $1574.58 | $1108.83 |
From the data we’ve gathered, renting physical textbooks is still cheaper than buying eTextbooks. However, renting eTextbooks will save you the most money. So if you’re going to rent your textbooks, you can save a lot more if you rent them in a digital format instead of the physical format.
What Happens When You Can Only Go Half-Digital?
The biggest problem with trying to go completely digital is that publishers still aren’t releasing every textbook as an eTextbook as well. Even though we researched over 100 different required textbooks from universities across the U.S., only 32% of them were available as an eTextbook or eTextbook Rental.
Some eTextbooks are widely available from a number of retailers with competitive prices, but sometimes students won’t be able to find the digital version of their required textbook. The big question is, what happens if you’re forced to go half-digital, half physical for your textbooks? Can you still save a lot of money? Yep.
Here’s an example of a student at Clemson who can buy half of their books as eTextbooks on their iPad.
| New Textbook | Used Textbook | Rental | eBook | eBook Rental | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Data Comm. | $189.50 | $142.25 | $102.50 | $106.50 | $58.66 | |
| Life in the Universe | $139.00 | $104.25 | $75.25 | $91.80 | $47.19 | |
| Operations Management | $239.75 | $180.00 | $129.50 | $139.01 | $121.24 | |
| Pearson Custom Business | $111.75 | $84.00 | n/a | n/a | n/a | |
| Java Software Solutions | $121.75 | $91.50 | $65.75 | n/a | n/a | |
| Econ Today | $137.25 | $103.00 | $103.00 | n/a | n/a | |
| Total Costs | $992.50 | $745.25 | $560.00 | $337.31 | $227.09 |
Even though they need to rent two of their books and buy another, this student would still save $80.16 this semester by purchasing eTextbooks when possible. That doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of four years that averages out to $641.28 in total savings – enough to pay for a 16GB iPad with 4G.
Every student booklist we researched had at least two textbooks available as eTextbooks. Overall, adopting a digital strategy with college textbooks should pay off over the long haul. But there are exceptions.
Sample iPad savings per semester: $80.16 for purchasing eTextbooks when available
Digital Doesn’t Win Every Time
Sometimes booksellers will offer a great price on a used textbook rental that eTextbooks can’t match. It’s rare to see a textbook rental cost significantly less than an eTextbook rental, but it does happen. And if you can’t even find an eTextbook Rental for any of your books, you might face higher costs for going digital.
Here’s how that happened for a student at the University of Maryland:
| New Textbook | Used Textbook | Rental | eTextbook | eTextbook Rental | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundations of Multidimensional Data Structures | $71.20 | $56.25 | $23.47 | $70.90 | n/a | |
| Notes on Data Structures | $33.80 | $26.70 | $26.70 | n/a | n/a | |
| Technical Communication | $109.05 | $86.15 | $38.75 | $45.99 | n/a | |
| The Physics of Sound | $151.45 | $119.65 | $33.13 | n/a | n/a | |
| Physics Lab Manual | $50.65 | $40.00 | $39.84 | n/a | n/a | |
| Probability Statistics for Engineering | $252.05 | $199.10 | $114.51 | $93.98 | n/a | |
| Total Cost | $668.20 | $527.85 | $276.40 | $210.87 | n/a |
For this particular student, three of his six textbooks are available as eTextbooks, but two of them are more expensive than a rental textbook, and we couldn’t find anyone selling eTextbook Rentals for his other books. He’d actually end up spending $34.14 more if he bought eTextbooks when he could and rented the rest.
The market for physical print can be a bit unpredictable. You might be able to find a great deal on Amazon or someone giving away the textbook you need on Craigslist. The availability of eTextbooks should increase dramatically every year. So if you’re starting your Freshman year of college, buying eTextbooks should be a safe strategy, whereas Juniors and Seniors might be leery to ditch print.
Shop Around For Deals On eTextbooks
Knowing where to buy eTextbooks is one of the biggest challenges to embracing digital books. You can find some stuff on Amazon and the iBookstore, but right now there’s really not a great one-stop shop that has every eTextbook you’ll ever need. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but we got the best results for both physical and digital books from these sites:
Don’t Buy From Your College Bookstore
Whether you want to buy physical textbooks or eTextbooks, we found that college bookstores consistently had the worst prices on textbooks. Take Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems for example. Arizona State University students can buy it new at their bookstore for $224.25 or buy it new from Barnes and Noble for $152.39. Even better – students could just rent the eBook from Amazon for $39.49
Unless you need a textbook immediately, you should search for it online first before paying the high markup at your bookstore. Every little bit of saved cash counts, especially when your student loans have to pay for your books.
Conclusion
The Digital Revolution hasn’t completely reshaped the textbook industry just yet. But it’s starting to, and the iPad is the most open platform to for eTextbook reading because it can be used to read eTextbooks from the iBookstore, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Kno, and many other suppliers.
Even though some eTextbooks can be hard to find, the financial benefits of investing in digital format will most likely pay off for students over the four years spent at college. If you’re looking for an excuse to buy a new iPad, this might be the best one we’ve seen.
