by Richard Schaaf

Created on: September 04, 2010   Last Updated: September 05, 2010

Who does not want to get their college books for free? Not long ago I too was an undergraduate at a university. I can still remember going to the bookstore on campus my freshman year and finding out that my book cost was going to be over $300, even with all used books. I found that to be well out of my price range.

Soon I discovered that you could buy books online from a number of different websites, but still the cost was eating into my entertainment fund. Then one day I heard about a wonderful idea, renting your textbooks. By renting, I was told, I could acquire the books at a fraction of the cost of buying the books as well as save myself the hassle of having to carry my books to the local resale shop and thus try to sell my books back at the end of the semester for a fraction of what I paid for them. This seemed like a good idea to me, rent your book and save money.

This got me to thinking about the idea of renting books, and suddenly it came to me. There already is a way to rent books, for FREE! It is called the library, a no cost (unless you are not punctual in returning your books) convent renter of reading materials.  Lo and Behold! The majority of my books were in fact housed at the campus library. The majority of the books that were not housed in my campus library were available through a free service offered at nearly every community college and university in the world, both public and private, called Interlibrary Loan.

Interlibrary Loan is a service available at your college library whereby they can request a book from nearly every library in the world. I have requested books that have come to me from the other side of the world. What this means to you is if the book exists anywhere in the world, you can obtain it through Interlibrary Loan. My senior year, my professor assigned rare, obscure and thus expensive books to read for his class. If I had bought them online I would have paid well over $2,000! The extreme rarity of the books also precluded the use of any online rental service. I was able, however, to acquire these books through the college library and Interlibrary Loan at no cost. It is for this reason that I recommend those of you seeking to reduce your college expenses to make use of your college library and Interlibrary Loan.

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