Some courses, including Life Sciences 2: Evolutionary Human Physiology and Anatomy, require books that are custom made by professors with only select chapters. These books are only available at the Coop.

This fall, the Coop began renting textbooks. Across the college textbook industry, bookstores are offering more options to students, including new, used, digital, and most recently, rented materials.

Aleah C. Bowie ’13 rented a book for Anthropology 1010: The Fundamentals of Archaeological Methods and Reasoning this year.

“Unless you really want to save a book, it’s really the best option,” Bowie says.

Even before the Coop began renting, Bowie took advantage of online renting websites.

Instead of selling the book back to the Coop as used, students can rent it at about 50 percent of the retail price, according to Murphy.

The issue with renting textbooks is that in order to meet profit margins, books must be rented multiple times, which can be a problem when new editions are frequently released.

Approximately 35 to 40 percent of the books at the Coop can be rented, and approximately 20 to 25 percent can be purchased as used, according to Murphy.

Murphy sees the benefit of with working with Barnes & Noble on the rented books program. Barnes & Noble’s partnership with universities across the U.S. means that if a Harvard coursebook is only assigned for one year, Barnes & Noble can transfer the books to another store for future rentals.

The Coop pays all profits from member purchases after taxes and operating expenses to its members. Each year, the rebate changes. There are years when the Coop does not have a rebate. This year, the rebate is 8.5 percent after receiving over $42,000,000 in annual revenues.

However, many students do not pick up their rebate checks and fail to take the discount of the rebate into consideration.

“When you’re buying the book, you don’t think about the rebate. I completely forget about it until they send it,” Bowie says.

“The concept of a rebate is confusing and not well communicated, and we want to address that. We’ve been questioning what is the best value. We’ve had a rebate since the founding, but maybe we should have different discount structure,” Murphy says.

OTHER BOOKSTORES

The Coop is not the only provider of textbooks for the University. Schoenhof’s provides all foreign books.